Re: English/German terminology, git.git's de.po, and pro-git

From: Holger Hellmuth (IKS) <hellmuth@ira.uka.de>
Date: May 15, 2013, 15:31 UTC
Message-ID: <5193AA61.2040205@ira.uka.de>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LNX.2.01.1305151502220.15513@nerf07.vanv.qr>

Am 15.05.2013 15:14, schrieb Jan Engelhardt:

Show 14 quoted lines

>
> On Wednesday 2013-05-15 14:27, Jens Lehmann wrote:
>>>
>>> While it's spoken Packdatei, the way to actually write it is
>>> .pack-Datei or ".pack"-Datei.
>>
>> I actually had the '-' in there too until I tried to look up "Zip-Datei"
>> in the Duden. While I don't get the leading '.' (I cannot remember having
>> seen that anywhere, AFAIK the file extensions are always used without the
>> dot), I'm not a grammar expert and will be fine either way.
>
> In UNIX-land, extension seemed to always include the dot.
> In DOS-land, it's without (inherited from VMS too, perhaps?)
> As such, either way to write it is acceptable.

Even in unix-land no one adds a dot because usually the extension is named after the data format, only that the file extension is used as the common abbreviation (at least that is my interpretation). Compare with jpeg. You often write jpeg-Datei instead of jpg-Datei because the data format is called jpeg. This is why I don't think the dot has any reason to be there. I can't remember ever seeing anyone writing .jpg-Datei (or .doc-Datei, .rar-Datei) except to ask what a .xyz Datei contains (i.e. when he doesn't know what the data format is)