It’s a more easily readable drop in for A and B. And it being convention helps remove one unfamiliar element from a new topic.
Not only more readable than A and B but I would argue it’s also easier to remember who did what a few sentences or paragraphs earlier since Alice and Bob invoke slightly less generic mental images than A and B. For example one is a woman and the other one is a man, maybe even some person or character you know.
And now that I’m thinking about it, the different gender also makes it easier to keep track of who does what because different pronouns are used (at least in English and many other languages).
If you ever go to r/relationship_advice and read posts where their friend T did S with P and then A (23 F) got into with G, then yeah…Alice and Bob suddenly makes a lot of sense.
T did S with P and then A (23 F) got into with G
Someone tried “April & Bob” once, but MS excel converted it to date.
Incels 🤝 Excel
Falsely assuming something is a date
Because the names by themselves give you context about who’s transmitting to who, who’s trying to eavesdrop, and it’s become a convention.
The convention isn’t necessary, but it makes material easier to understand because of the convention
Alice: Point A
Bob: Point B
Eve: Eavesdropper
Mallory: Malicious Actor
Same as
foo
,bar
,baz
🙄why do you provide a link to creative commons license? Ive seen such links few times on lemmy.
This guy licenses his comments under creative commons for some reason.
Tryin to make a change :-/
Thank you for recognising that.
But whats the point of giving out a license along the comment? Are you giving permission to use your comment?
For non-commercial use, yes. Aka no closed-source AI.