[R] Is there a canonical way to pronounce CRAN?

[Achim Zeileis]

My personal impression is that in the early days of CRAN the pronouncation 
as in "C-Ran" was more common but this has shifted towards "Cran" over the 
years.

CRAN was named in the same style as CPAN for Perl and CTAN for TeX (as 
others have pointed out in this thread already). Many R users and 
developers were also active in other free software communities and were 
familiar with CPAN and CTAN as well. Hence "C-Ran" was natural.

But because - unlike the other abbreviations - CRAN can be pronounced as 
"Cran" it was attractive for wordplays like Cranberries 
(https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/), Crantastic 
(https://github.com/hadley/crantastic), fortunes::fortune("Yes we CRAN!"), 
etc. Also, I would guess that the vast majority of today's R users (and 
possibly also developers) is not familiar with CPAN or CTAN anymore. Hence 
"Cran" is more natural for most of them.

And given that even the founders of CRAN sometimes pronounce it in one and 
sometimes in the other way, I think it is fair to use both pronouncations.

Best wishes,
Achim


On Wed, 4 May 2022, Roland Rau via R-help wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I talked with colleagues this morning and we realized that some people (=me) 
> pronounce CRAN like the German word "Kran" (probably pronounced like "cruhn" 
> in English -- if it was a word).
> My colleague pronounced it as "Sea-Ran" or "Sea-Run". The colleague was a 
> student and has worked at the same institution as an R Core Developer and 
> heard it from him personally.
>
> So now I am puzzled. Have I been wrong about 43% of my life? ;-)
>
> Honestly: Is there a unique way how the core developers prounounce CRAN?
>
> Not an urgent question at all but maybe interesting to many of us.
>
> Thanks,
> Roland
>
> --
> This mail has been sent through the MPI for Demographic ...{{dropped:2}}
>
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