Horton

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

Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>

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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
To: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2021-06-10T08:31:37Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

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  1. Doc: use "an SQL" consistently rather than "a SQL"

  2. Doc: use "an SQL" instead of "a SQL"

  3. Use the correct article for abbreviations

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".

> 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

> 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.