I haven't seen how Windows 95 has been sold in Europe, but did they really change
all of the documentation to the Brittish spellings of words like "colour" and
"minimised"?

Besides, at least in your POV-Ray text file "#declare Red = colour rgb <1,0,0>" is
valid.

Josh English
eng### [at] spiritonecom
www.spiritone.com/~english


povray.org admin team wrote:

> From time to time we of the POV-Team get bug reports or complaints that are
> downright rude and sometimes also insulting. Today we received this doozy which
> has to rate as one of the most rude and insulting emails we can recall
> receiving this year.
>
> First, a bit of background : 'true' English (i.e. the English language as the
> English themselves spell it) uses the 'z' less often than American English.
> Words such as 'minimised', 'optimised', etc, are spelt just like that - with an
> 's' instead of a 'z' (e.g. not 'minimized' or 'optimized').
>
> Over the years, Americans have modified various parts of the English language
> to create these variants (another good example is the US 'color' vs the English
> 'colour'). That's all well and good - we don't dispute the right of Americans
> to change the language they speak.
>
> However, POV-Ray is an international effort, and several of the POV authors are
> not US residents. These developers generally speak English as the English do,
> rather than American English (this is typical of most of the English-speaking
> world, outside the USA). This means that software developed by these persons
> will often use English, rather than American, spelling, unless they make an
> effort to do otherwise.
>
> That's our right and our choice. Almost every English speaker in the world
> (outside the USA) knows that there are two ways of spelling some words - the
> English way, and the American way.
>
> Unfortunately, it seems that the reverse is not true. We do have, in the POVWIN
> help file, a comment to that effect in the very first topic (which obviously
> the person whose email is featured below didn't read).
>
> Look at it from our point of view : if we spell something correctly, using the
> English spelling, it's only fair that we ought to get peeved if someone writes
> to us telling us that we 'don't know how to spell'. Non-American English
> speakers would perhaps rightly get a little annoyed if an American tells them
> THEY don't know how to spell, when after all it's Americans who changed the
> spelling in the first place ! The original English spelling is still valid,
> like it or not !
>
> So anyhow, the person whose email to us is excerpted below seems to have the
> rather strange belief that if he writes to us and insults us, somehow we'll be
> only too pleased to fix the so-called 'bug' (and he did call it a bug) in our
> software.
>
> We dashed off a quick reply to him telling him - in no uncertain terms - what
> we thought of his idea, but we're posting this here in the hope that some of
> his fellow POV Users will also be able to explain this to him in a more
> reasoned way (rather then the somewhat annoyed tone of our reply ;)
>
> We also would like to officially nominate Jason Barlow for the 'Rudest Support
> Email of 1998' award.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Return-Path: jas### [at] xmissioncom
> From: "Jason Barlow" <jas### [at] xmissioncom>
> To: <win### [at] povrayorg>
> Subject: Minor Bug...
> Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 01:03:02 -0600
>
> [request for the following 'bug' to be fixed in version 3.1 deleted]
>
> Whoever is writing  the string/menu resources for  the Windows version is not
> very adept with words like optimized, minimized, or customized...all of which
> are misspelled: optimised, minimised, and customised in POVray. Bad spelling
> is just one of those things that detracts from the professionalism of the
> product and makes users question the intelligence of the authors.
>
> [rest of email deleted]
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> He's questioning _our_ intelligence ... ? ;)
>
> -- POV-Ray Webmaster

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