Ihor Radchenko <[email protected]> writes: > Paul Eggert <[email protected]> writes: > >> The Emacs CONTRIBUTE file says: >> >> We prefer American English both in doc strings and in the manuals. >> That includes both spelling (e.g., "behavior", not "behaviour") and >> the convention of leaving 2 spaces between sentences. >> >> This preference extends to identifier spellings. > > That's not obvious.
It does makes sense, though. Standardizing on one spelling should make identifiers easier to remember and harder to mistype. (Or it would, if not for the exceptions: I don't think I've ever seen Americans use anything but "advertise" in the wild, but funnily, this roundup included obsoleting a defalias containing "advertized.") Generally, -ize is a safer choice whenever -ise is not explicitly prescribed: -ize is also acceptable in UK English, and it's slightly less messy to switch from -ize to -ise than the other way around. Regards, Christian PS. "Analyze," on the other hand, is just a misspelling, whatever American dictionaries say, and I have the +analyzis+ _analysis_ to back that up. :)
