I should really buy a copy of The Design and Evolution of C++. It apparently contains a rationale for C++’s choice of throw and catch (as opposed to, say, Python’s raise and except). The rationale in D&E is presumably similar to this one from Stroustrup in 1989:

We will use the phrase “throwing an exception” to denote the operation of causing an exception to occur. The reason we don’t use the more common phrase “raising an exception” is that raise() is a C standard library function and therefore not available for our purpose. The word signal is similarly unavailable. Similarly, we chose catch in preference to handle because handle is a commonly used C identifier.

Upon reading this paragraph, I immediately noticed the parallel to the currently active Coroutines TS. The Coroutines TS has to use keywords like co_await and co_yield because for example yield() is a common system call that signals the OS to switch to a different thread for a little while.

…Or is it? I went looking for a link to the man page for yield (2), and found that the function in <sched.h> is actually named sched_yield (2). And then in <pthread.h> there’s pthread_yield (3). There is no yield (2) listed in The Open Group’s documentation of <unistd.h> at all!

Is this like the Berenstein Bears and that Sinbad genie movie? Have I been imagining the existence of yield (2) all these years?

(I note that yield (2) does exist on Solaris. It is also commonly named that way in university OS courses, such as the one I took circa 2005, so that’s probably where I picked up the impression that yield was the Unix/Linux name for the operation. Solaris’s use of yield as a reserved name has caused issues in real life, indicating that there are plenty of people out there who don’t consider the use of yield as a user-space identifier to be problematic… until it bites them, that is!)