Donald E. Knuth and Peter van Emde Boas on priority deques (1977) [pdf]

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62 points·vismit2000··5 comments

> on the van Emde Boas construction

Cool to see that the capitalization of Dutch names was as confusing then as it is now.

The correct way to write that would have been with a capital 'V'. The rule for these surname prefixes in The Netherlands is that they are not capitalized unless it's the first letter of the name. So it's "Peter van Emde Boas" but "Mr. Van Emde Boas".

To add to the confusion, that capitalization rule is different for Flemish names. There the first one in the surname is always capitalized: "Willy Van der Steen" and "Mr. Van der Steen".

I wouldn't call it confusing because the rules are very regular. Prepositions and articles are lowercase unless they start the sentence, the same rules apply to spelling in titles (eg. book titles).

It’s confusing because you have to know the nationality of a person to know how to capitalize their surname (In Flemish Dutch, prepositions that do not start a sentence are uppercase if they’re part of a name)

And nitpick: you likely meant “Willy Vandersteen” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Vandersteen), but that would be a bad example as it, I think, would always be capitalized, also if he were Dutch.

What was the piece of furniture?

cc'ed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hopcroft and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tarjan

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