"Justin Johansson" <n...@spam.com> wrote in message news:hlop1u$o1...@digitalmars.com... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-" when >> talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're uneducated, >> they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant by that prefix. > > What about persons with English not as a first language? >
I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but at some point a library has to use *some* language, and the established standard for phobos just happens to be english. If we start banning terms from use in a language or a library on the basis of whether a non-native english speaker is likely to know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given language/library because there's no guarantee non-native speakers would know any of it. For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried to use it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and da (and I'm not even sure of the correct spellings of those - in either roman or cyrillic). And I would be well aware that I wouldn't be able to assume I knew what something did without a little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking programmers, and that it's an issue native english speaking programmers like me will probably never be able to truly understand, but until we get to some hypothetcal point in the future where everyone speaks the same language, then, again, at some point there really is no choice but to just assume at least some particular language. Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of vague meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of about a minute to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the stuff cloth is made of and stitched together with. And "SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to an english speaker, but I still learned it quickly enough. So even if I wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than "old style", I'm sure I still could have gotten used to it very quickly, especially considering that in 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty damn clear that it's not being used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and flock-of-seagulls haircuts.
