Deliberate, perhaps, but wrong, imo :-) I don’t think that using leaves instead of leafs would have affected clarity of the text. Perhaps if leaf was an acronym for something else using a different plural would have been justified.
Even copilot thinks that we should be using leaves, and I’m not aware of other cases in general computer science literature on data structures that use leafs rather than leaves. It seems to just be a YANG thing … Kind regards, Rob From: Jan Lindblad <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, 6 September 2025 at 23:22 To: Andy Bierman <[email protected]> Cc: NetMod WG <[email protected]> Subject: [netmod] Re: leafs Andy, I can assure you this is completely intentional. IMHO this is a misunderstanding based on the false assumption that a biological tree leaf == datastructure YANG leaf. These are two different kinds of concepts that happen to have the same spelling of one of their grammatical forms, but are actually different words that conjugate differently. This kind of differentiation makes sense in (computer) science text, since adhering to traditional grammar rules would often make technical text less understandable/precise. In Python we talk about trys, defs, ifs and elses. In YANG discussions we often talk about when constructs in such a way that half a page turns red with wavy grammar underlines. And we aren't going to titlecase the names of symbols in the documentation just because english grammar requires it. Imagine a man page about Fopen() or Str() or Show Interfaces. Best Regards, /jan It was pointed out to me that RFC 8407bis spells the word "leaves" incorrectly (15 times). My answer was that it is trying to be consistent with RFC 7950 (31 times), which started in RFC 6020 (27 times). Does anybody remember why the WG went with an incorrect plural of "leaf" in RFC 6020? Obviously, it cannot be changed now, but maybe this was intentional, and the reasoning is documented. >From google: Note: "Leafs" is sometimes used as the plural form in proper nouns, such as the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, but it is not the general plural of the noun "leaf". Andy
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