Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

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On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 12:34:21AM -0500, Varun Varada wrote:
> 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



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