In Interaction between languages in Parrot, chromatic wrote parenthetically: nit: Perl 6, with the space please.
Why? And more important, what makes the distinction important enough to make? Is this a deliberate attempt to out-shibboleth [Pp]erl[ ]?5?
The responses indicated that everyone clearly understood what language the OP was referring to when he mentioned "Perl6", so the important thing - communication - was achieved. And unless the p6 community has created or is about to invent distinct meanings for "Perl6" and "Perl 6", I don't see the potential for miscommunication in the future.
I fear this sort of pedantry, aimed at people that have not yet made the jump, will unnecessarily drive people away - and I am sure the spark of an aside today will feed the forest fire of future flamewars.
Please leave pedantry to the compiler. It knows what it wants, and it usually has a good reason for it.
Hugo
Pedantry is a key to good spelling which is a question of style.
I don't see the potential for miscommunication in the future either - but there should be one agreed favourable way of spelling this properly.
Just imagine everybody inventing his own orthography without ever sticking to it - but wait, this is what we already have, isn´t it?
(Admittedly, an example may very well be this, my post.)
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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]
The point I wanted to make is that it depends on your audience and subject wether your current level of accuracy and consistency is considered appropriate. While it is perfectly possible to be a pedant without applying much accuracy and consistency (I would call this pathologic pedantry), you might have to become a bit of a pedant to yourself temporarily i.e. if you want to learn orthography or Perl, just until your new and now essential level of accuracy and consistency has become a habit.
In this positive sense pedantry lost its negative connotations sometimes, at least for me. Most other humans will most likely consider perlmonks to be pedants anyway ;)
I don't know if this is the thinking behind it or not but search engines will index "perl6" differently to "perl 6". People searching for "perl 6" without quoting it in the search query will get pages that mention "perl" and "6" and unfortunately will probably not get pages with "perl6".
That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).
That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).I agree with you on the /Perl ?6/ front. But the British borrowed those awful non-phonetic spellings from the French, didn't they? Too bad for us Italy or Spain wasn't closer geographically :p
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, ...Umm, excuse me, but French can be even harder than English to learn, because it is not spelled as it's pronounced. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, yes, almost rigidly. The others I'm less familiar with, but I'll concede those for now.
One of the most common complaints about French is the inability to spell a word having heard it pronounced correctly. (Pronouncing a written word is considerably easier, though not foolproof.)
-QM
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Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
I think Italian and Spanish have simpler pronunciation rules with less (no?) dependency on position within a word but I think French might still be conistent.
-imran
"Une ville" versus "une fille", par example.
In the opposite direction (one pronunciation, multiple spellings), the following (from french.about.com) demonstrates the problem. All of these are pronounced similarly: parlerai, été, c'est, peiner, frapper, vous avez
The English words were spelled phonetically at the time the spellings were determined. That is to say, those silent 'e's at the end of a word were pronounced; and a word like "knight" was actually spoken with a k-sound, the gh as a gutteral sound. The spoken language changed but the printed remained relatively stable, so now our words have some incredibly strange spellings. Think cough, hiccough, plough, though, tough, through. I'd hate to have to learn English as an adult...
thor
The only easy day was yesterday
I suspect that chromatic and the O'Reilly staff have already created some style guidelines for books about Perl 6, and somewhere on this list it says "Perl 6, not Perl6". While this may appear arbitary to some, it will nevertheless define the way that all official texts from O'Reilly will appear. And dare I say, as O'Reilly goes, so goes the community. {grin}
The whole distinction between "perl" and "Perl" was a similar declaration on my part during the writing of the initial Camel. I told Larry that the name of the language "disappears" when it is in the middle of the sentence, and we agreed that we could call the language Perl, and the interpreter perl (in a constant font), so that neither of them would disappear in text.
Was this completely justified in an absolute sense? Not really. It's a style decision for typographical reasons, but it also defined how an entire generation of people spelled both.
So, ease up on chromatic. He's probably quoting chapter and verse of a style guide that has been defined and agreed upon. Because of that, it'll also be how every "official" doc appears, and if you write it differently, people may understand what you mean, but they'll wonder why you're typing it differently.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.
... a style guide that has been defined and agreed upon
Binding on O'Reilly authors, perhaps, but not on PerlMonks.
Sure, it's an O'Reilly standard. But I'm free to suggest to you that you also use the same standard here. You're free to reject it. What's your point?
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.
Uggh! It's your fault! :-( Sorry, but I've always hated the capitalization convention, because it breaks English capitalization rules for no good purpose.
How often did you really need to distinguish between the language and the interpreter that translates the language? In the rare case that you did, why could't you use the extra word instead of forcing the reader to remember that when the non-proper noun Perl is capitalized (contrary to the expected rule for capitalization), it is secretly a macro that expands to mean "the perl language", whereas, in all other cases, "perl" means "the perl interpreter", and not "the perl language". This is contrary to what is done with all other computer languages I know of; and contrary to the rules for English, as well.
I guess I'm annoyed because now people on PerlMonks act like I'm the one who's wrong when I don't mis-use the English language standard like everyone else.
It's a real problem. I'm losing my ability to speak my native language, because people keep breaking the few patterns we still have that keep it cohesive and comprehensible. I don't understand the people on my street; they don't speak the same dialect of English that I do. I've watched in bemusement as two foreigners struggle to say two words to each other, because each one mangles their English in an incompatible way.
And when I finally spend time with literate people who should know enough to respect a language, I instead get these kinds of linguistic abuses to contend with. I've got enough legitimate exceptions to remember how to deal with without tripping over deliberately engineered trickiness.
Sorry to rant, but it's just another straw on the camel's back for me.
I usually don't care for linguistic drift, but remember that English capitalization "rules" developed quite a while before reprinting literal commands for computers accurately became necessary. Some American English quoting "rules" tend to break other commands if typed literally as written too.
Also, language is evolving, Perl moves on to version 6, maybe english should come along too *scnr* ;)
Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley
If anything, object to "perl" being used uncapitalized for the name of the interpreter. But be aware that it's in conformance with a lot of tradition for computers (since the names of commands are usually case sensitive, it's common to leave them in all lower case even at the begining of sentences).
Do you capitalize the word "screwdriver"? It's the name of a type of tool, just like Perl is.
Neither one refers to a specific instantiation of the underlying concept; neither one should be capitalized.
Proper nouns almost always apply apply to things that are specific instances of something, with the notable except of certain things were granted special respect due to historical accident (deities, terms of address for monarchs, the lands ruled by monarchs, and the languages spoken there etc.).
The name of the interpreter is the one that deserves the capitalization; more desperately, it also needs a distinguishing name.
"Active State Perl is an implementation of perl" reads according to the rules one would expect. "Active State perl is an implementation of Perl" certainly does not.
If anything, object to "perl" being used uncapitalized for the name of the interpreter. But be aware that it's in conformance with a lot of tradition for computers (since the names of commands are usually case sensitive, it's common to leave them in all lower case even at the begining of sentences).
Feh.
What would have been wrong with naming the UNIX interpreter for the perl language "UNIX Perl", and stating that the binary for UNIX Perl was typically named 'perl'?
I object largely to the miserable condition of (1) naming the binary after the language itself, and (2) compounding that error by attempting to mangle the capitalization of a word to compensate. We don't use language that way, nor should we be expected to. It's extra work, to little or no gain.
Overloading meaning of a word by accident is one thing; doing it deliberately is what annoys me.
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Ytrew
Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.
It's just a preference on my part, but I find it ugly without the space. (I suspect it looks wrong to me in the same way that someone capitalizing "van der" would look to you.)
This is just my opinion, but for me Perl 6 seems to indicate that it's just a new version of Perl, while Perl6 suggests that it's a new language. (I might just be imagining this, see TeX78 is very different from TeX, but C99 is clearly only a new version of the C standard.)
Also I recommend that you don't give too much importance to this issue. If, as you say, chromatic has said "nit", you don't have any reason to think it's a very important distinction.