Re: Standardizing on Oxford English

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

Hello,

I noticed the Documentation/SubmittingPatches file reads:

quoted

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