Re: [patch] doc/*.texi: Fix typos and follow spelling conventions.

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Ziemowit Laski wrote:

> On Tuesday, Dec 17, 2002, at 13:08 US/Pacific, Wolfgang Bangerth wrote:
>
> > Matt Austern <austern@apple.com> writes:
> > | For what it's worth, this sort of deliberate misspelling
> > | (for documentation that's known to be incomplet and incorrekt)
> >
> > I find this offensive: writing incorrekt with a "k" is clearly made to
> > mock about Germans writing English. I request this to be changed to the
> > more neutral "incorreqt" ;-)
> >
> > (But then, maybe, arab speaking people will object).
>
> Wow, I didn't even consider the political correctness angle when posting
> my objection.  :-)  On a more serious note, the misspellings are not
> only unprofessional, but may confuse those among us for whom English is
> not a native language.
>
> I'm a bit surprised that someone who on other days insists that all full
> stops be followed by two spaces would intentionally mangle words in this
> fashion.
It's tough to pass on the traditions sometimes, especially with the
net reaching so widely.  Some of these things are traceable all the
way back to the MIT AI Lab, where hacker traditions and ideas would
be transmitted verbally to the person sitting next to you.  There
were more of these in GCC when RMS maintained it - the COFF support
header was called robotussin.h, some bits for Lucid's Cadillac IDE
were in a cp-edsel.c file (rather prescient that one, heh-heh), and
of course the hangman-playing #pragma was legendary (hey, the
standard just said "implementation-defined").

Things like these are the open-source equivalents of the Easter
eggs that are ubiquitous in proprietary "professional" software.
Even the most soulless of corporations can't totally stamp out
the true hacker spirit!

(One of these days I simply must dig out my talking GCC hack and
update it for the current sources...)

Stan