Re: "an SQL" vs. "a SQL"

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 9:31 AM Peter Eisentraut <
peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:

> 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.

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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