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British or American spelling?

3 messages · Gordon K Smyth, Kurt Hornik

Original
Gordon K Smyth
# 
I was curious to read the following in the "Guidelines for Rd files" at 
http://developer.r-project.org/Rds.html:

     "For consistency, aim to use British (rather than American) spelling.
      (NB: British spelling often uses -ize as in `capitalize'. The view of 
spell -b
      of British spelling is a flawed American one. There are English/Scottish
      differences too.)"

because R seems to use American spellings throughout, e.g., "color" instead 
of "colour".

What is the current R-devel view on this?

Gordon
Kurt Hornik
# 
I don't think it is 'throughout' but rather a mixture of both, for both
R and packages on CRAN, and I don't think we can force the exclusive
use of British spelling.  

Actually, this is one of the main motivations for having functionality
for fuzzy matching in R.

-k
Gordon K Smyth
#
At 10:05 PM 27/04/2003, Kurt Hornik wrote:
Thanks for that. I was considering going through my Rd files and making 
changes in line with the recommendation, but now I will leave as is.

Even though I live in a British spelling country, it makes sense to me to 
use American spellings for publically available programs and associated 
documentation.
Cheers
Gordon