Q. "postfix" or "suffix"
Wikipedia and The Free Dictionary were not much help — is there a practical difference in the semantics of suffix and postfix, except that the latter is more rare?
File name extensions are well known. For example, index.en.xhtml could reasonably be assumed to be the index file of a website directory, in XHTML format, and with primarily English, human-readable contents. I’d normally call the collection of extensions (.en.xhtml in the example) the suffix or postfix, but it’s not obvious which (if any) is technically and/or semantically more accurate.
A. both can be used "interchangeably"
I think both can be used interchangeably, although the context sometimes determines which word you are more likely to use. For example, in linguistics, an affix after the stem of the word is called a suffix. In computer programming, when an operator appears after the operand, it is known as a postfix operator.
As far as a file extension goes, my intuition would be to go with "suffix", but I believe that "postfix" would be equally valid.
The word "suffix" has been around since 1778. I was unable to uncover a similar etymology for the word "postfix", leading me to guess that it is a modern invention, as "post-x" is a more obvious candidate for being the opposite to "pre-x". In this regard it is very much like prepone in Indian English, except that it has caught on globally.
세 줄 요약:
- 맥락에 따라 특정 단어가 더 자주 쓰일 순 있으나 두 어휘는 상호 교환적으로 사용이 가능하다.
- 파일 확장자는 "suffix" 가 좀 더 맛있어 보이는데, 뭐 "postfix" 라고 안될거 있겠는가?
- "suffix" 는 과거부터 쓰였으나 "post-x" 시리즈는 그렇지 않으므로, "pre-x" 에 대응하여 만들어진 어휘로 사료된다.
관용적으론
suffix, 특정 분야에선prefix와 짝으로postfix.
Reference
[WEB] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/81263/postfix-or-suffix
