Re: Standardizing on Oxford English
- From
Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
- Date
- Jun 5, 2020, 19:44 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20200605194437.au5vcy2wpcwi65md@chatter.i7.local>
- In-Reply-To
- <CAD2i4DCyovfV78rXwH+B+tNOeDM7rJCHWSCPFOiCv7mVR+56ew@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 12:34:21AM -0500, Varun Varada wrote:
Show 7 quoted lines
> Hello, > > I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads: > > > We prefer to gradually reconcile the inconsistencies in favor of US English > > May I ask why?
Traditionally, the "GNU C" locale expects that the character set used for all output should be in "us-ascii" -- a choice dictated by historical encoding standards. The most logical language to use when writing in something called "us-ascii" is "US English." :)
This has little current day relevance, but projects with code histories spanning decades tend to stick with whatever the expectation is for the "C" locale as their default language.
> US English is highly idiosyncratic, illogical, and used > by a minority of the English-speaking population of the world (see > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences).
You could try being Canadian and sit on both of those chairs at the same time. Then you can use both "colour" and "authorization" in the same text. :)
I think that since git was "born" in the US (courtesy of a Swedish-speaking Finnish immigrant), it makes sense for it to continue to use US-English as the internal default. There's already a way to cause it to output your preferred version of English by setting your locale appropriately.
-K