I thought it might be worth having this conversation before we branch for v15.
It seems we have no standard as to if we say "a SQL" or "an SQL".
Personally, I pronounce the language as es-que-ell, so I'd write "an
SQL". If you say "sequel", then you'll think differently. The reason
I do this is that the language was only briefly named sequel but was
renamed to SQL. For me calling it sequel seems wrong or out-dated. End
of personal opinion.
Let this thread not become the place where you tell me why I'm wrong.
Let's just get some consensus on something, make a change then move
on.
Overall we seem to mostly write "a SQL".
~/pg_src$ git grep -E "\s(a|A)\sSQL\s" | wc -l
855
~/pg_src$ git grep -E "\s(an|An)\sSQL\s" | wc -l
295
However, we mostly use "an SQL" in the docs.
~/pg_src$ cd doc/
~/pg_src/doc$ git grep -E "\s(a|A)\sSQL\s" | wc -l
55
~/pg_src/doc$ git grep -E "\s(an|An)\sSQL\s" | wc -l
94
I think we should change all 55 instances of "a SQL" in the docs to
use "an SQL" and leave the 800 other instances of "a SQL" alone.
Changing those does not seem worthwhile as it could cause
back-patching pain.
I mostly think that because of the fact that my personal opinion
agrees with the majority of instances in the docs. Makes more sense to
change 55 places than 94 places.
Interesting reading:
http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-sequel/
Further, there might be a few more in the docs that we might want to
consider changing:
git grep -E "\sa\s(A|E|F|H|I|L|M|N|O|S|X)[A-Z]{2,5}\s"
I see "a FSM", "a FIFO", "a SSPI", "a SASL", "a MCV", "a SHA", "a SQLDA"
My regex foo is not strong enough to think how I might find multiline instances.
David