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I also know Americans who go by their middle names because everybody in the family has the same first name, with the first name turned into an initial before th
by mcpackieh 3y ago
I also know Americans who go by their middle names because everybody in the family has the same first name, with the first name turned into an initial before their middle name. Usually software can handle this by entering "J Bob" in the first name field, but not always. Sometimes software asks for first name and middle name separately, and then you know you're going to have trouble because another system thinks "J Bob" is your first name and the two won't match.
I think a single field for the entire name would be ideal, with an optional second field for "how should we address you?" so that the software doesn't have to play games with asking gender and breaking out the last name to fill out a form letter with "Dear Mr. Smith, ..."
- cratermoon 3y agoNames are not strings. Until software developers get that through their heads, the situation is going to stay broken. I consulted on a project for a US-based airline. The horror show that is Sabre infests everything, and Sabre doesn't understand any character that didn't exist in six-bit BCD
- esafak 3y ago> Names are not strings. So what are they?
- cratermoon 3y agoStrings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not. To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array. Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.
- mcpackieh 3y agoThere are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.
- cratermoon 3y agoPoint me to the international standards for representing money.
- Shadowmist 3y agoISO 4217
- cratermoon 3y agoTIL
- esafak 3y agoWithout making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.
- cratermoon 3y ago> making assumptions We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoThe main problem with the single field idea is alphabetisation.