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Comment by esw | Hacker News Reader

My wife took my surname when we married, but rather than hyphenate she decided to go with a space. Although the names are each quite short (e.g. "Jones" and "Smith"), this has proven to be a significant challenge for our bank, and even on her drivers license (which compressed her name to JONESSMITH). It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem to anyone other than people who want to cite her research.

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It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem

Really? Because a space is commonly used as the delimiter between first, middle and last names. Wouldn't you think that, at a minimum, there would be some ambiguity about whether Jones was (one of) her middle name(s) or the first part of her last name?

First name: [ANN] Last name: [SMITH JONES]

Seems easy enough, right? They don't have one big field for [ANN BETH SMITH JONES] and then try to guess what name is forename or surname.

Some systems don't like hyphens, or don't like spaces, or appear to accept them but silently drop them kludging the two names in SMITHJONES.

Add the 'scunthorpe problem' and things get even more frustrating.

One of the Google feedback pages declined my feedback because my (legitimate, linked to my Googlemail account) email address and name contains "Cocks".

Google+ currently even chooses to disbelieve that a person's first and last names can be the same. Oddly, this wasn't the case a few years ago, since I managed to create an account with my real name, then. Trying to consolidate all my accounts under one failed recently, though.

Randall Randall?

Yup.

I have been looking at your username for over five and a half years and that never occurred to me.

That just makes me want to feed people poison eels.

This doesn't work for people with suffixes very well, or with the "last name" not being at the end. Back when I was into genealogy a lot, about ten years ago, the "family name" was typically indicated by slashes. So in that format I am "Christopher Mark /Gore/". Your example would be "Ann Beth /Smith Jones/". It also works for people like "James Michael /Smith/ Jr." or "/Kim/ Jong-il" or "/Kim/ Il-Sung".

I guess if you absolutely must pack multiple bits of information into one space, that works really well.

And to think this was only posted an hour ago:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

There are plenty of European family names that have one or more spaces in the middle. Some examples:

de la Chapelle

von Braun

zu Guttenberg

af Slestad

A computer system that assumes that Wernher von Braun's middle name was "von" is ridiculous.

> A computer system that assumes that Wernher von Braun's middle name was "von" is ridiculous.

Of course, apart from using the proper name/title when composing a letter (something like Freiherr von Braun), which is easy if you know the ‘last name’, the computer system in question would also have to sort this guy properly next to Werner Braun.

Names are complicated.

> Names are complicated.

Take John von Neumann for example.

* Born 'Neumann János Lajos' (family name followed by given name order used in Hungary).

* His name changed to 'margittai Neumann János' when his father was elevated to nobility.

* He germanized his name to 'Johann Ludwig Neumann von Margitta'

* ... which got shortened to 'Johann von Neumann'

* He finally anglicized it to 'John von Neumann' when he moved to the US

I'm not at all sure I got that 100% correct...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

many spanish/latin people have the last name of their mother and father. ie Laura Marcos Moreno

But de, la, von, zu, and af are not themselves distinct last names. If fact it would be reasonable to assume there is case-sensitive logic in said fictitious computer system to determine what the last name is.

The following mostly-identical names read very differently:

- Sarah Anne Jones Smith - Sarah Anne Jones-Smith - Sarah Jones Smith - Sarah Jones-Smith

What about names like Sarah Saint John or Sarah Saint Clair? And I'm not sure the abbreviated versions (with St.) are any easier to deal with.

Or how about Joran van der Sloot?

I don't have much of any experience with Dutch names, is "van der Sloot" the entire last name?

My example was meant to be "the final word and all preceeding lowercase words are considered the last name."

That wouldn't work on my name, because in my case the 'Van' is capitalized.

Another one is the French Canadian nom-dit form. Some of my ancestors had the name 'dit Laverdure'.

Also from French Canadian, some last names have a period in them, I know someone with the last name "St.-Germain".

That may be your experience, but it's not universal. My surname is 'Van den Brande' (yes, capitalized like that please). It's a very, very common name, pages and pages of it in the local phonebook. My daughter's surname is 'Van den Brande - Isaacson'. It would be nice if programmers could get it right, it's just a string after all.

(PS Not our actual names, but they follow that pattern).

Here's mine: "[FirstName] [SecondName] e [FirstFamilyName] [SecondFamilyName]". That article ("e") in the middle gives me trouble all the time. First time I went to NYC I got asked by the passport guy what that "e" meant. I told him it was just an article connecting the first part of the name to the second. He didn't really believe me and started asking if it meant something like Edward. After a couple of minutes trying to explain it's not that rare in my country he let me go.

Spaces are also common in last names. Among our friends and neighbors we have surnames like La Rosa, Van Meter, Del Toro, Di Giovanni. We expected that there would be ambiguity around whether the two names were middle and last, and even joked about the poor grad students trying to figure out how to cite her work. We did not expect that major institutions (like the state we live in or a multinational bank) would be incapable of storing a last name that contained a space.

It's great seeing all the replies about how systems should be designed to handle this situation. But given the scope of the pedantry, it's surprising that my point was missed.

That point being that I was surprised that it wouldn't even occur to someone that there would be some difficulties with this in the world in which we currently live.

Here in semi-small-town USA, I hear a couple traffic stops a day with spaced double-lasts on my scanner. They're quite common, and don't give the cops, dispatch, or the Washington State DMV any trouble at all, even in the company of a middle name. Why would you expect something so mundane to be problematic?

Apparently because I have a more realistic expectation than you of the limitations and annoyances of many of the things encountered in day to day life.

Not knowing in advance that limiting the last name field to too-short strings is acceptable.

Blaming the user whose name is too long for that field rather than the mistaken assumption in the design of the system is not.

> ... is commonly used as the delimiter between first, middle and last names...

Where? Everywhere in the world?

Anyway, I thought that the reasoning that a customer could not be served because address or name "does not fit into the system" were frowned upon since the time of COBOL mainframes, but seeing this whole thread with its resort to a hyperbole of "0.01%" cases is a welcome contrast to the otherwise high aiming goals plastering the homepage of this site.

... that isn't even a rare case. Half the Latin-American world does paired names with a space instead of a hyphen.

That would have surprised me as well. I would've thought that at least any combination of ascii letters and spaces up to a certain length would be fine. It might piss me off enough to change banks.

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