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Bug 841 - use consistent british or american english throughout
| Status | CLOSED FIXED |
| Reported | 2011-07-21 15:13:00 +0200 |
| Modified | 2019-08-10 12:36:59 +0200 |
| Product: | FieldTrip |
| Component: | core |
| Version: | unspecified |
| Hardware: | PC |
| Operating System: | Windows |
| Importance: | P1 enhancement |
| Assigned to: | Johanna |
| URL: | |
| Tags: | |
| Depends on: | |
| Blocks: | |
| See also: |
Johanna - 2011-07-21 15:13:11 +0200
This is a 'trivial' enhancement, feel free to say "won't fix"! :-) The spelling of functions sometimes uses American spelling, e.g. ft_lateralizedpotential.m ft_artifact_*.m and other times British spelling, e.g. ft_neighbour*.m ft_channelnormalise.m First step is to decide which spelling. (British, since that is the default for English in the Netherlands?) Probably some inconsistencies on the wiki too.
Jörn M. Horschig - 2011-07-21 15:35:16 +0200
British is standard here? good to know ;)
Eelke Spaak - 2011-07-28 12:34:01 +0200
But: American English is standard in the software world. Something to think about.
Jörn M. Horschig - 2011-07-28 13:24:17 +0200
But: Do should we really want to support a language from a country that cannot pay its debts? ;)
Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen - 2011-09-07 14:16:41 +0200
first: identify as many as possible words which exist in 2 versions. then: agree on how it should be -check whether it is possible to automatize this: compare all code (in fieldtrip and documentation) against an online dictionary and do a brute force replacement. if this is not possible, don't do it.
Johanna - 2011-10-25 11:37:36 +0200
Created attachment 177 tally of number of uses of british/american spelling throughout wiki and code See attached for tally of number of uses in 34 example words. There exists a bias towards American spelling used overall. However, in 10/32 words examined, there is a British bias in either the wiki or code or both. I agree with Eelke that since US spelling is standard in coding, and for example, that Matlab code uses the american spelling of 'color','gray','while' in calling plotting/loop functions, I would suggest to use US. Aside from 'neighbour', which is the biggest UK spelling example within FT, many of the other UK spellings come from the (more) external contributions (SPM, Simbio, gifti, multivariate, etc). I assume FT wouldn't force SPM to use US spelling!
Arjen Stolk - 2012-02-15 13:48:22 +0100
(In reply to comment #5) american is the language of keuze change configs change function names change documentation
Johanna - 2013-02-10 11:12:37 +0100
found a new one: remove all instances of 'different to' in documentation: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxdiffer.html and use 'different from' instead.
Lilla Magyari - 2013-07-23 23:13:20 +0200
reassigned to joint development user. lilla
Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen - 2014-03-06 16:05:30 +0100
Does anybody has sufficiently strong emotions about this one in order to assign it to him/herself and get it resolved? If not, I suggest to change status to wontfix and close it for now.
Johanna - 2014-03-06 16:13:58 +0100
Just out of curiousity, if action on this were to be taken, was the decision (based on Arjen's comment 6) that American was the one to switch to? I'd love to take this up, but realistically don't have time.
Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen - 2014-03-07 12:50:32 +0100
I think we settled on American English. I would really like to clean up the unassigned list. Even if you don't have time for this anytime soon, I will still move it to your assigned bugs ;-).
Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen - 2016-05-17 12:47:13 +0200
http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2016/04/01/the-queens-matlab/ Hehehe, but look at the date at which is was published...
Johanna - 2016-05-24 11:58:23 +0200
(In reply to Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen from comment #12) If only that weren't an April 1st post!
Robert Oostenveld - 2018-10-31 20:42:42 +0100
this is something to keep in mind, but does not require concrete action.