On Jul 10, 2009, at 8:44 PM, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Freitag, 10. Juli 2009 05:26 schrieb roconnor@theorem.ca:
I find it amazing that you independently chose to spell colour with a `u'. It makes me feel better about my choice.
I have to admit that it makes me unhappy. :-(
Why do we use English for identifiers? Because English is the language of computer science. What English should we use? It’s tempting to say, we should use the original English, which is British English. But we should ask again what is the language of computer science. And the language of computer science is American English.
It was possible to adopt such an attitude in the 20th century. But this is the 21st century. We have globalisation, internationalisation, localisation. We have Unicode, so that people are no longer limited to the set of characters that technicians from the USA found tolerable back in 1967. (Note that "Americans" includes French Canadians and lost of people who mainly speak Spanish.) Let's face it, by this argument we'd have to abandon the metric system when writing computer programs. There are good reasons to adopt American speling for a term or English spelling. They include the language that the author is most familiar with, the language the paying customers are most familiar with, the language of the laws that the program has to conform to, any number of things. But there is a way above this issue. Why can't we have BOTH "Colour" AND "Color"? What changes, if any, would it take for Haskell to support bidialectal naming practices (whether it is English -vs- American, insular/Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Arabic dialects, or whatever)? We can create an alias for a type easily enough. We can create an alias for a defined function easily enough. We cannot create an alias for a constructor; there is no way to say data X = A | B Int constructor C = B so that C can be used for pattern matching just like B. We cannot create an alias for a module name; while we can create a module that re-exports everything from some module, there is no way to make them act the same as far as inheritance of dotted names is concerned. SML has similar limitations, but not quite the same. It lets us create alias for types and defined functions. It also lets us create aliases for modules, its structures and functors (more or less). But even SML doesn't allow the definition of aliases for constructors.
To my knowledge, most early developments in computer science had their roots in the US. One consequence of this is that reserved words of programming languages are typically in American English. PASCAL uses “program”, not “programme”, and BASIC uses “COLOR”, not “COLOUR”. So, in my opinion, Haskell color packages should use the identifier Color, not Colour. By the way, I also write my papers and documentation in American English.
Best wishes, Wolfgang (who is neither British nor American) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe