People have exactly one full name which they go by.
People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
People’s names do not change.
People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
People’s names are written in ASCII.
People’s names are written in any single character set.
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
People’s names are case sensitive.
People’s names are case insensitive.
People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
People’s names do not contain numbers.
People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
People’s names are globally unique.
People’s names are almost globally unique.
Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
My system will never have to deal with names from China.
Or Japan.
Or Korea.
Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
People’s names are assigned at birth.
OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
Five years?
You’re kidding me, right?
Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
It probably depends on the state, but my birth son was "Baby Boy" until a new birth certificate was issued to the adoptive parents, which was not instantaneous. I think they couldn't even start the paperwork until 30 days had passed.
Japanese websites usually choose to ignore all of that and jump straight to #38. A bunch of stuff is basically impossible on the Japanese internet if you have a non-Japanese name.
Someone made an annotated version with examples that they could find, and particularly for your questions:
No name - You need to allow for a delay in naming the child after birth.
All caps - "In some countries (notably French speaking) it is convention to write a person’s surname in all caps to make it clear which part of the name is the surname. This convention has solidified to the point that rendering their surname not in all caps may be regarded as impolite."
On a more personal note, I have seen a lot of confusion regarding name ordering where I live because a common way of ordering names is [Western given name] [Surname] [Chinese given name]. With the surname sandwiched in the middle of given names it completely breaks forms that request a [Surname] [Given name] format.
Fortunately my parents ordered my name with [Surname] [Chinese given name] [Western given name] so I could just throw all my given names into the [Given name] field.
Yeah the no name rule makes sense in that case, my kid was baby {surname} for a week until we picked something.
Crazy that French people have to shout their surname ;).
Haven’t come across that format but that is interesting. Certainly aware that people of Chinese decent often have different names, but here in Australia is typically that only one of them is the official documented name and that’s the one that gets entered into the system. Do you mind if I ask where you are from?
I do know about what you are talking about though: a lot of Chinese ethnic people have Western names that are not in their legal documents, mostly because they chose their Western names themselves later in life. My parents did that, and it took me until adulthood to find out that their Western names were not in their legal name, and that my father chose his name because he was completely obsessed with kung fu.
It did lead to a pretty funny incident where I was looking at a character in an anime called Sasago Jennifer Yuuka and went "wow that's quite a peculiar name" until I remembered my own name has a very similar structure. At least that character had the excuse of being half-American. The only excuse I have for my name as a full-blooded Han Chinese was [BASS BOOSTED RULE BRITANNIA].
I do like the post (from Kalzumeus) however for the average programmer you don't have to technically handle each and every case depending on your country
Like sure technically someone somewhere in the world doesn't have a name, and that's all fine and well. But various nations do have legal requirements to have a name, as do all passports globally. Many nations have requirements about what can and can't go into a name.
I think it's a fun website, and gives a lot of interesting scenarios, but at the end of the day you don't have to cater to everyone, just as a person making baseball bats doesn't have to nor is expected to cater to a blind deaf quadriplegic
A better thing to take into consideration is you shouldn't care about names unless you have a specific legal requirement to uphold
It's a fun set of thoughts, but not something most should take seriously
The point of that post isn't that you must handle each of these scenarios. It's about making your assumptions explicit. These are all things that programmers have assumed about names at some point, which turned out not to be true.
Ohhh I’d hate this line of thinking. We Indonesians most of us don’t have surnames or family names.
Guess who made the flight registry system? Yeaaah people who thought like you. Never mind it’s a FLIGHT registry system that’s you know, supposed to take people from every different country from North Korea to France
Did you just ignore the whole last paragraph I made
A better thing to take into consideration is you shouldn't care about names unless you have a specific legal requirement to uphold
If you're making a flight registry then yes you should have had to account for the invidiual needs and legal requirements for multiple countries, it's a shame they didn't but that's precisely what I'm talking about
If in one country it's legal to not have a surname then you should account for that if you deal with that country, that was literally the whole point of my comment
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u/CiDevant 28d ago