RE: SMIE documentation

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> >> +text as an sexp according to syntax tables.
> >            ^^
> >            a
> 
> Hmm... In my several years in the states,

You mean Montreal is not in the States? ;-)

> I spent a fair bit of time hacking on Emacs, but I didn't talk
> much about sexps (I talked about types instead), so I'm not
> sure how people pronounce them usually, but I pronounce them
> "ess-exps", which is why I put an "an" rather than an
> "a".  So I'd first need confirmation that it's indeed pronouced as
> something like "sexp".

You might find usage variable.[*]  Personally, I wouldn't dream of saying "ess-exp" (I can hardly pronounce it) - I always say "sexp".  But then I don't say "ess-ex" either, unless referring to the county in Britland. ;-)

"A sexp" is used in the Emacs and Elisp manuals. "An sexp" appears nowhere in the manuals. And "a sexp" is generally used for Lisp, AFAIK.

Googling "+sexp pronunciation lisp" is no help, BTW. Likewise the Wikipedia entry for S-expression. And oddly s-expression, sexp, and symbolic expression are absent from the Common Lisp HyperSpec's index and glossary (is there a searchable version?). And I cannot find anything about this in CLTL2 (is there a searchable version that works?).

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[* The pronunciation of `SQL' varies, for instance -

It is typically pronounced "sequel" in Oracleland - that is reflected in the Oracle doc.

But as Wikipedia says: `Officially pronounced /ˌɛskjuːˈɛl/ like "S-Q-L" but often pronounced /ˈsiːkwəl/ like "sequel"'. 

One post at http://www.orafaq.com/forum/t/155444/0/: `A lot of non-native English speakers pronounce it as S.Q.L in their mother-tongue and then "translate" it to Es Que El in English, whereas most native English speakers I know pronounce it as sequel.'

About.com: `By the way, the correct pronunciation of SQL is a contentious issue within the database community. In their SQL standard, the American National Standards Institute declared that the official pronunciation is "es queue el." However, many database professionals have taken to the slang pronunciation "sequel." The choice is yours.' 

One post at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23886/sql-pronunciation: `A long time ago IBM had a database with "QUEL" (QUEry Language). It was followed up with "SEQUEL" (a joke, since it was a sequel to the first language). The pronunciation followed through to "SQL", which is officially "ess-que-ell". So both are considered correct by most people.']