Support American (USA) spelling of @behavior

[sikanrong]

Environment

• Elixir & Erlang/OTP versions: all versions
• Operating system: all OS

Current behavior

defmodule MyMod do 
    @behavior GenServer
end

warning: @behavior attribute is not supported, please use @behaviour instead

Expected behavior

(should accept the "@behavior" attribute just as it would "@behaviour")

In general, the language should always support both British and US spelling styles, so as to be maximally inclusive to the global development community.

[sikanrong]

Fun observation: even the Github issue template for this project uses the US spelling "behavior". US spelling style is doubtlessly the one in more common use throughout the world.

[josevalim]

Please start a discussion on the elixir core mailing list but generally speaking, having two ways of doing the same thing is arguably worst than having a single way, even if surprising.

[sikanrong]

having two ways of doing the same thing is arguably worst than having a single way, even if surprising.

While normally I would agree; I just don't see this as being two ways of doing the same thing. I could see how it could be interpreted that way, but really all we're asking for is an alias.

[josevalim]

Well, it is literally two ways of achieving the same behaviour. :) If we add this, we increase the odds that in the same codebase some can use @behaviour and others use @behavior. Especially on teams composed by different people around the world, which will more naturally pick one or another.

[fertapric]

For the record, this was supported at some point and deprecated probably for the reasons @josevalim mentioned above

[wojtekmach]

If we support @behavior then arguably we should also automatically define a module.behavior_info/1, IO.ANSI.colour* aliases and likely much much more, and I'm not sure if that's beneficial enough to justify all these changes.

[sikanrong]

@wojtekmach actually this is really the change that I'd wanted to see - that everything with a british spelling to be aliased with the US spelling as well.

Anyway guys, after reading your comments I can at least better understand the logic behind not supporting it, and the fact that perhaps it would not be desirable that in a given project people might be using both spellings, etc.