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

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 at 03:24, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> If there were some semblance of an overall consensus on the spelling,
> I'd be fine with weeding out the stragglers. But when the existing
> usages are only about 2-to-1 in one direction or the other, I feel
> quite confident in predicting that incoming patches are often going
> to get this wrong.

I'm pretty sure you're right and we will get some inconsistencies
creeping back in. I'm not really sure why you think that will be hard
to fix though. If we catch them soon enough then we won't need to
worry about causing future backpatching pain.

> Especially so if the convention you want to
> establish in the docs is contrary to the majority usage in the code
> comments --- how is that not going to confuse people?

Why would someone go and gawk at code comments to clear up their
confusion about what they should write in the docs? I think any sane
person that's looking for inspiration would look at the docs first.

I really think it's worth the trouble here to be consistent in our
public-facing documents. When I read [1] earlier and the blog started
talking about Oracle documentation using sequel consistently before
going on to talk about MySQL's documentation, I started to get a bit
worried that the author might mention something about our lack of
consistency. I was glad to see they missed us out of that. However,
maybe that's because we are inconsistent.

If you really feel that strongly about not changing this then I can
drop this. However, I'll likely growl every time I see "a SQL" in the
docs from now on.

David

[1] http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-sequel/