Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

It goes even further.

I know Mies van der Rohe (architect) from a street name, from an address change that once was important to me. I googled his name a long time ago, and that's almost all I remembered.

The name "Mies van der Rohe" follows a common pattern for people with a history from the Netherlands, "$firstname van (der|den) $lastname". So, I almost automatically splitted his name into "Mies" and "van der Rohe". Guess how suprised I was when I heared "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe" recently. OK, so LMvdR surely had two first names, that's quite common here. "Ludwig" and "Mies" must be the first names, and "van der Rohe" the last name. WRONG! "Mies van der Rohe" was his last name.

Just to annoy anyone handling names in computers, he was commonly refered to as "Mies" (which translates to english as lousy, crappy, bad). And to really annoy anyone handling names in computers, he was born as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies. A female first firstname, and no "van der Rohe" at all.

Some more examples: Re^7: regex to return line with name but not if it has a number - and I guess the name of the second example in that post has drastically changed this year.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re^2: Split first and last names by afoken
in thread Split first and last names by Bod

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.