Re: maintenance of overriding subprograms

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Dan says

<<To be more specific, I spelt "Initialize" as "Initialise" which is the
correct spelling of this word in Australian English.  ( I know the Americans
spell it with "ize", but am not sure how it is spelt by English people.)
Anyway, this attempted overriding of the routine in Ada.Finalization resulted
in a constraint error because of the failure to initialise the structure,
rather than a compiler error which one would normally expect from misspelling
an identifier.>>


Although there is no one authority for American spelling that is definitive,
the spelling with Z is universal in the US. In England, there is one
authority, the OED, and as we have discussed before in this newsgroup,
the OED ONLY permits the spelling with the Z, and does not recognize
the spelling with an S. 

This is the case, despite the fact that many Englishmen would swear that
British English requires an S. Thus it is not good enough for someone
from Australia to merely claim that this is the standard Australian
English spelling, you need to cite some appropriate authority.

All of which of course is besides the original point, which is that in both
England and Australia, and who knows where else, people do indeed spell
it with an S, and get no initialization (or finalization) as a result,
which can be quite a surprise.

In fact on our list to do with GNAT is always to warn if a primitive
operation is defined on a controlled type with the names Initialise or
Finalise if the profile matches that of the Z-equivalents.