If PHP Were British

[wbhart]

If it were truly British then upon an exception it would apologise excessively and offer to dust you off.

Queues would also be ubiquitous. Data could not be accessed in order, but would have to be retrieved from an unordered queue, which would necessarily involve a long wait.

There would also be a congestion charge for drivers at certain hours of the day and interfacing with Rails would cause unexpected delays.

[gmac]

Hmm. Queuing might well be ubiquitous but data would be accessible only in meticulous order: from the head of a queue and from nowhere else.

[sesqu]

unordered queue

What is that? Do you mean a regular, non-priority, queue?

[halostatue]

Funny, but completely ignorant of the fact that Canadian English is distinct from Amrican English. We generally spell it 'colour' here, but draw the line at 'connexion', and have two spellings for 'seriali[sz]e', depending on the audience and style guide you follow. Joe Clark has a wonderful book about this, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours (http://en-ca.org/).

[rll]

Yeah, the opening paragraph to this one lost me. I have a Canadian passport and I was living in Canada at the time and we spell it "colour" there. But yes, I chose to go with American English over Canadian/Danish/Inuktituk simply because I was already used to that from other languages. Like others have mentioned, non-American programmers don't tend to think of the terms in programming languages as an extension of the language, but simply as tokens that do things. Having those tokens consistent across languages makes sense.

[cperciva]

Interestingly, Canadian English is almost en-GB-oed -- which is the closest thing the world has to "international standard English", seeing as it's the dialect preferred by both the United Nations and the International Organization for Standardization,

[BerislavLopac]

I'm amazed that no comment has yet mentioned my favo(u)rite take on the subject, the immortal Lingua::Romana::Perligata http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... ;)

[corin_]

I find myself getting genuinely annoyed when having to write things like "color" in CSS.

I wonder, though, as fun as it is to think about these jokes, what serious implications it had. Let's say, for example, it actually had been started with variables using a £ rather than $, would it have made any difference at all?

[citricsquid]

really? I'm British and I'm quite amazed at how I can (without ever thinking about it) switch between colour and color. I wonder if maybe some people approach programming as a different language (eg: color isn't colour, it's color, it is a unique thing) and then some approach it as an extension of their own language.

[tristanperry]

When I was younger it'd annoy me. I'd always forget and slip back into writing colour. Then I'd wonder why the text or background colour of something wasn't changing. A few minutes later (of checking I was editing the right file, that I was changing the property of the right id/class, etc etc!), I'd finally realise I was simply 'misspelling' it. DOH!

Now, though, things have clicked and I find I can very easily switch between color and colour when needed.

Even to the point that if I'm typing on a US based site, I tend to use color (and Americanized spellings), and on non-US sites I tend to British spelling. Can take a while to get used to though.

Anywhoo, I loved this blog post :) Especially the:

Words fail me at this point. How is any self-respecting gentleman expected to make head or tail of these "words". It beggars belief that anyone could allow such distortions of words to be entered into a programming language. They, along with the myriad of similar errors, should be reverted to their proper forms immediately:

Bit!

[randlet]

I write a fair bit of wxPython code and one of the things that always struck me as surprising is that you can use widget.Color or widget.Center interchangeably with widget.Colour and widget.Centre!

[abhaga]

> Let's say, for example, it actually had been started with variables using a £ rather than $, would it have made any difference at all?

I cannot see £ sign on my keyboard, so that would be slightly inconvenient. :)

[rbanffy]

> Let's say, for example, it actually had been started with variables using a £ rather than $, would it have made any difference at all?

I think that had more to do with the $ usage in Perl rather than with currencies.

[Sodaware]

The biggest problem would be that the £ symbol is not on US keyboards. The # symbol takes its place, but is called the pound sign rather than hash.

[j_col]

Brilliant! Given my sadness today around HP destroying the mobile platform I love (webOS), this has really cheered me up ;-) I especially like the cheerio() function.

[AlexC04]

I too thought it was brill. Next, lets play "if PHP were cockney"

[tarkin2]

$ is superior though, simply for its ease of access using the left index finger.

£ would require the use of the middle finger.

To British sensibilities, it would mean swearing at PHP on every variable declaration! Actually, that said...

[benjoffe]

£ isn't even available on my keyboard, I would need specific software or IDE features just for this.

[__rkaup__]

On my UK keyboard, $ is <shift-4> and £ is <shift-3>. They're right next to each other.

[lubutu]

The only language I know which actually uses "colour" in its standard library, is Occam, designed in Bristol. Are there any others?

(Nitpick: "socialize" is the original spelling; "socialise" was a change in spelling on our side of the pond.)

[corin_]

There's actually many cases where we (Brits) hate on the American version without realising that actually theirs is the version we were using back when we sent people over to America, and it is us we have changed over the years not they. Still annoys me though :)

[pash]

The large majority of -ize/-ise verbs come from Greek words ending in -ιζειν [-izein] (sometimes via Latin, in which they end in -izare). English adopted many of these words via the French, which lacks "Z" as a native letter, and so the -ise spelling.

Americans reverted to the -ize spelling on the principle of spelling words as they sound (a foreign concept to the language, we must all agree), and much of educated Britain likewise used the -ize spelling on etymological grounds. (Thus Oxford spelling [en-GB-oed].) Esteemed English institutions such as the Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press still use the -ize spelling, as did The Times, until it came to be perceived as an Americanism in the 1980s.

International English, such as that used by the United Nations, follows Oxford spelling and so uses -ize.

[profquail]

Well, it's not "colour", but there are actually a few types in the .NET Base Class Library (BCL) which use the British spelling. Example: the StackBehaviour enumeration (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.em...)

[georgefox]

The popular ggplot2 library for R uses colour, though I think color is also accepted in some places.

http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/scale_gradient.html

[iwwr]

POV-Ray script accepts both spellings.

http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.0/230/

[mahmud]

The British dialects of English have undergone far more change than English elsewhere. Some British dialects were heavily influenced by French, or imitated the francophone "upper" classes so much so that they no longer trill their 'r'. [Citation Needed]

Also, India preserves the vocabulary of the old English bureaucracy, now lost in Britain. [Citation Needed]

[pestaa]

Ogre 3D (C++ library for realtime graphics) also uses the word colour, designed by a bright guy from Channel Islands, South England.

[pointyhat]

BBC BASIC, which does the reputable thing of accepting it both forms equally.

[mambodog]

Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

[uriel]

And if PHP was Japanese it would commit Seppuku.

[thelovelyfish]

If it were British there would be alcohol involved somehow.

[voyou]

We're talking about PHP, so I think we can take it as read that there was substance abuse involved somewhere.

[premchai21]

preg_match might actually be better expanded as practical_extraction_and_reporting_language_regular_expression_match. (I'd comment on the original but it's currently too overloaded for it, I gather.)

[ojbyrne]

Actually, my understanding is that the p in preg actually stands for perl. php.net refers to PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions).

[rbanffy]

"pathologically_eclectic_rubbish_lister_regular_expression_match" would be my first choice.

[justincormack]

Not overloaded, just form an orderly queue and wait please.

[DaveChild]

I moved the site to Linode and set my swap incorrectly, so as soon as the memory ran out it fell over. Oops.

[code_duck]

yeah, where does 'perform' come from?

[fdb]

He does have a point with the abbreviations.

The use of abbreviations and underscores in PHP is maddeningly inconsistent.

Example:

  pdf_stringwidth
  strlen
  str_replace

[reinhardt]

How long until some bored hacker writes a british<->us PHP compiler and posts it here? I give it a week.

[jordinl]

A colleague once complained because I wrote 'initialize' with a z...

[cafard]

If we change the sigils, can we refer to objects as "quiddities"?

[zandorg]

In Common Lisp, 'Fourth' is the fourth item in a list, rather than 'Forth'.

[tricolon]

Why would one spell it 'forth'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_numerals#Ordinal_number...

[georgieporgie]

I always thought the dollar sign originated as a variable marker because it was used in BASIC to mark a string. Is there an earlier origin?

[4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs]

Now if PHP were Japanese?