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Re: A language by any other name



On 27-Sep 08:28, Bill Wohler wrote:
> Sean Middleditch <elanthis@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> > > Why such emphasis?  The idea is to spell words like "colour" instead of
> > > "color", not to write the ls man page in iambic pentameter.
> 
>   No, the idea is to spell it "color," not "colour."
> 
>   The mass of writing in the computer world is American English, for
>   better or for worse, and having different spellings in a single
>   system is as distracting and unprofessional as misspelling the word
>   entirely. Now some don't think that misspelled words are a big deal,
>   but these are not enlightened people.

American English is no better (or worse) the British English. Even a mix is
better then no documentation at all. In the whole debate, I think the real
problem is that locale hasn't been configured correctly yet. "English"
should alias to en_US here in the US, and en_GB in England. If really don't
like your man pages in en_GB then _you_ should "translate" it to en_US. 

I just don't care. Unix in general has trouble with locales; there seems to
be at least two wheels for this problem and they are traveling to different
directions. (locale from glibc and the alias from Xfree; are there any
others?)

[snip]
>   If a multi-billion dollar company whose employees have all learned
>   British English decide that their documentation should be in
>   American English, that's saying something.

This just shows that they know where they sell most of their software, it
doesn't mean that "American English" is any more useful.

Just my $0.02,
Thomas

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