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Postings from July 2011
On Sun 11-07-31 13:23, Father Chrysostomos via RT wrote:
> On Sat Jul 30 15:07:29 2011, kst@mib.org wrote:
> > This patch corrects some typos in several pod/perl*.pod files.
> >
> > Apart from some obvious misspellings, some of these changes might
> > need some discussion (though IMHO all the changes are correct):
> >
> > "nan" --> "NaN"
>
> I’m not sure about that one. On most non-Windows systems I’ve tried it
> one, it stringifies as nan:
>
> $ perl -le 'print sin 9**9**9'
> nan
>
> I seem to remember seeing CPAN modules that provide a nan() constant,
> but not NaN. There are also plans under way to make nan stringify as nan
> on all platforms. So I would be in favor of changing every instance of
> NaN to nan. (This isn’t JavaScript, after all. :-)
Hmm. I see your point -- but I would argue that "NaN" is a more
appropriate name in English text, whatever it stringifies to.
For example, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN> consistently
refers to it as "NaN", not "nan" (except in the list of string
representations). And I find "NaN" clearer.
Similarly, there are a several hundred occurrences of "zero",
which stringifies to "0".
[...]
> > "supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous" -->
> > "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
>
> That’s not even a real word, so how can there be a correct spelling? And
> I always thought it had a double l in -calli-. :-)
It's an invented word. It's also the title of a song from
Mary Poppins, and the correct spelling of the song title is
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
(No, Wikipedia isn't definitive, but other references should be
consistent.)
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Nokia
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
-- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"
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