1783210 - Spelling checker should allow "Fortran"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Spelling Checker: en-US Dictionary, defect)

Description

[steve]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Safari/537.36 Edg/103.0.1264.77

Steps to reproduce:

Enter a message that includes the name of the programming language Fortran.

Actual results:

Word flagged as possibly misspelled, FORTRAN suggested as a replacement.

Expected results:

Fortran (mixed-case) has been the name of the programming language since 1991. This spelling should be accepted by the spelling checker. I'd go farther and flag FORTRAN as a spelling error, suggesting Fortran as a replacement, as many people still write the name in uppercase when they are referring to the current language.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hey steve, Thunderbird doesn't control the spell-check dictionaries.
Not sure where to put this, let's try Core > Spelling checker as Wayne suggested.

Comment 2

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

This is about dictionaries and not directly about spellcheck feature. I'm not sure how to track this kind of thing since putting this on Bugzilla will not ping dictionary owners, maybe the triage owner know better.

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Same happens also in Chrome/Linux and LibreOffice (also those use Hunspell, among others)
It would be good to report this to Hunspell to get dictionaries updated everywhere.

Comment 4

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

Hmm, we should probably add a [meta] Hunspell issue at least.

Comment 5

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Word to add:

• Fortran

I don't think FORTRAN should be removed, as far as I can tell it used to be its name at the beginning
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub69-1.pdf

Comment 6

[steve]

I disagree. Nearly all of the time when someone types FORTRAN, they mean the current language Fortran. Yes, it was spelled FORTRAN until 1990, and if someone really wants to spell it that way they can, but it would be best if FORTRAN was flagged as a possible misspelling for the majority of cases.

For what it's worth, I am the Convenor (chair) of the international Fortran standards committee, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5.

Comment 7

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Updates landed in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/bbefbe4a2631

I've added Fortran but didn't remove FORTRAN for now. I understand your argument, but that's also consistent with what other dictionaries are doing (e.g. macOS).