Would drive me absolutely livid. But of course no one was allowed to fix is since it was already in a few different games, countless script files, network-controlled configs etc.....
> it's troubles
> it's projects
> So now I'm often finding myself misspelling common words
> And all of this is intentional too!
:-D
Did you just use incorrect as a verb?
Beaten by ten years: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 :)
CRIRCLE = 2
CIRCLE = CRIRCLE
You may notice that a lot of the code in Allegro spells 'palette' as 'pallete'. This is because the headers from my old Mark Williams compiler on the Atari spelt it with two l's, so that is what I'm used to.creat() is weird because create() would fit that constraint just fine, so there's no obvious reason as to why it had to be shortened. The 1978 K&R C book actually notes it with [sic].
Technically there are several namespaces since you can, for example, name a struct the name as its type.
I thought it was supposed to be REEFERER.
“a nickname” was originally “an ekename” (eke being an old English word meaning also)
conversely, “an apron” was originally “a napron.”
English is a weird agglomeration of different languages, with things like the application of French-style plurals (-s) to Anglo-Saxon words (but not always, cf. ox -> oxen) and a generally Germanic syntax with a large fraction of Romance root words.
As part of my Dewey Decimal Project¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ I ended up reading some interesting books on English linguistics (scroll down to the 500s for those).
———
1. I’m not quite done. I have two read books to blog about before I read the last book in the series which will be the book my local library has at its highest Dewey Decimal call number. Alas, it's not a 999 Extraterrestial Worlds book, but I think it's either Antarctica or Australia (I looked when I first started on this seven years ago, but I've since forgotten).
“Tests pass, ship it”
Unicode sidestepped the issue by naming the characters RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK.
“U+034F COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER
The name does not describe the function of this character. Despite its name, it does not join graphemes”
“The use of the spelling lamda derives from ISO 10646. This does not mean that it is more correct than lambda, merely that the spelling without the 'b' is the one used in the formal character names”
“A spelling error: "brakcet" should be "bracket". A formal alias correcting this error has been defined”
(There’s also the name caron for the haček, apparently not used by anyone before the 80s; per the official FAQ:
Q: Why is the haček accent called “caron” in Unicode?
A: Nobody knows.)
“Because Unicode Standard is a character encoding standard and not the Universal Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Character Identity, the stability and uniqueness of published character names is far more important than the correctness of the name. The published character names are normative for the purposes of the Unicode standard and the large number of other IT standards that reference it. These standards require stable identifiers and character names must therefore be immutable — any change of character names is almost as disruptive of the standards as changing code points for characters would be. Accordingly, the Unicode Consortium has adopted the Name Stability Policy, preventing changes in character names. As a result, errors in character names cannot be corrected. Instead, important character name anomalies anomalies (SIC) are documented with annotations in the Unicode Character Code Charts.”
Also because somebody, somewhere, might have used those names to look up Unicode code points.
Part of each Unicode release is a file named “UnicodeData.txt” (https://unicode.org/Public/13.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt), so those strings are public information.
I wrote my code and was fairly confident it was correct, submit the answer and it is rejected, spend the next few hours trying to find the logic error. Of course it's because English is ridiculous and it's "forty" instead of "fourty".
It doesn't catch everything however.
Even better, the library was called into as a COM object by a Visual Basic Script script, and the misspelled corner case only got hit rarely. Figuring out that the problem was the correctly spelled function call was a joy.