[Scummvm-devel] American vs. British English

[Max Horn]

Hi folks,

could we please agree on one way to spell things (American or British English) and then stick to that? I find it highly irritating (and having quite an error potential) that e.g. the new TsAGE engine defines a class "Serialiser" which is a subclass from Common::Serializer.

In general, I wouldn't mind so much, but this example really tripped me up. Personally, I am all for AE. Actually, I kind of always operated under the implicit assumption that this was our standard; but after just checking, this is not the case, as is seen by grepping for various terms. I did a count on the matching lines for some terms, using 
  gg -i TERM | wc -k
and got these results for AE vs BE spellings:
  color vs. colour: 9799 vs. 1209
  alize vs. alise  (as in serialize, initialize, normalize, ...): 1434 vs. 509
  behavior vs. behaviour: 122 vs. 63
  synchronize vs. synchronise: 17 vs. 203  (without tsage: 8)


Unless I hear strong reasons otherwise, I would like to ask all developers to try to stick to American English spelling whenever sensibly possible. Of course original game content is an exceptions. Also, for our GUI, I wouldn't mind if we offered both an AE and a BE translation (and if desired, also Australian, Canadian, etc.)


Bye,
Max