petition to rename "width" to "widgth" for monospace consistency with "height" and "length"
179 comments
@aCrownOfMoths @nina_kali_nina @aeva This is bringing up memories of reading Beowulf in Old English @nina_kali_nina @aeva in certain parts of Wisconsin you'll hear width and heighth @aeva why not? The 'g' is silent anyway. Not like it would be any *more* confusing than anything else in English.😋 @aeva maybe, but what about heidth and lengdth (and depdth), or perhaps more daringly, hidth, lidth and dipdth Next April you need to send a PR to some code base that would have a lot of changes, like Gnome. @aeva I could adapt to this easier than the many abominations such as “thru.” @aeva @overeducatedredneck Yes! Also, "up" to "up", and "right" to "rite", so all four cardinal directions can be 4 characters! @aeva May I suggest wideth: And if you program in fraktur it really helps to bring home that ye-olde look. 𝖛𝖆𝖗 𝔴𝔦𝔡𝔢𝔱𝔥 = "XXXVI𝔭𝔵"; ... & then you could abbreviate them "wid", "hei", & "len," & confuse the crap out of everybody, because those actually makes more sense than they should. @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place But they spell differently. Should be changed to wength, hength, length etc. @aeva sorry, no time for signing a petition, I'm hard at work on my new employee re-gruntler. @lritter @aeva it's all those Germanic-root words with the ch sound Modern English no longer really has. Back when English orthography crystallized that old pronunciation was already on the way out but it's still the root of all those spellings of words that are now hella confusing because they have little to do with how they're actually said out loud today. @aeva @lritter btw worth looking up the actual Grimm's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law#Overview because that stuff is wild @aeva @lritter like the whole chain shift is a fun curiosity when you see it written but considering it's an actual systematic change in pronunciation that happened fairly consistently throughout the first millenium BC, where therefore speakers must have fairly consistently drifted in their phonetics across a fairly large region, is just bizarre to think about @jannem @rygorous @lritter swedish is such a beautiful language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UmUX68KtE @aeva if I saw a library used “lat”/“long” instead of “lat”/“lng”, I’d instantly start looking elsewhere. To my way of thinking Length and Height are a happy pair, fitting together so well. And Width and Depth too, just another happy pair. Of course, if you want a menage a trois, and leave poor old Depth out in the cold, looking in and wishing.... @aeva @aeva what about a font ligature that will span width an extra character when the word width is found? @aeva No! I shall not sign your petition! I've always thought that the width was the smaller dimension, so I reject the consistency argument. PS: I try to avoid squares. @aeva You'll be hearing from the lawyers of 1970s programmers for wasting characters like that. Alternative suggestion: Replace length width and height in variable names with long wide and high. This will however limit the languages which you can work in. @aeva Alternatively, we could have "width", "heith", and "lenth" to save characters all around while preserving pronunciation (at least for some). if we get 100_000 boosts on this petition toot in under 30 days the obama administration has to weigh in on it If we really cared about consistency we'd align on both digits and also suffix consistency. Clearly, we need length, widgth and heigth. @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place I'm trying to say widght out loud and it sounds very Arabic to me |
@aeva And “depgth”!