On 10.06.21 09:26, David Rowley wrote: > It seems we have no standard as to if we say "a SQL" or "an SQL".
The SQL standard uses "an SQL-something".
I use both commonly, but the argument for "an S-Q-L ..." is strong I think - and I definitely think consistency is good.
> 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.
agreed
+1 in general, though I would perhaps suggest extending to any user-visible messages in the code. I don't think there's any point in messing with comments etc. I'm not sure what that would do to the numbers though.
> 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.
Um, of those, I pronounce FIFO, SASL, and SHA as words, with an "a" article.
Same here. I've never heard anyone try to pronounce SSPI, so I would expect that to be "an SSPI ...". The other remaining ones (FSM, MCV & SQLDA) I would also argue aren't pronounceable, so should use the "an" article.