According to an excerpt from the book Linux System Programming (by Robert Love), no official sources exist on the etymology of calloc
.
Some plausible candidates seem to be:
- Count or counted, because
calloc
takes a separate count argument. -
Clear, because it ensures that the returned memory chunk has been cleared.
- Brian Kernighan is reported to believe that the “c” stands for clear (although he has admitted he’s not sure).
- (See comments.) An early
calloc.c
seems to contain an explicit reference to the word clear in a source code comment (but no reference to the word count or to any other candidate). In another source code comment in the filemalloc.c
, the word clear appears again, in reference to the wordcalloc
.
-
C, as in the C language.
- (See alk’s answer and comments.) Possibly a naming convention for a set of functions that were introduced at about the same time.