[OT] Re: D User Survey

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, December 10, 2017 04:02:46 Nick Sabalausky  via Digitalmars-d-
announce wrote:
> On 12/09/2017 07:58 AM, wobbles wrote:
> > On Thursday, 7 December 2017 at 14:31:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
> >   I didn't know Ireland was so
> >
> >> unknown, unless, of course, I'm supposed to choose "Great Britain".
> >
> > I also hated myself for clicking Great Britain :-)
>
> As an outsider, I'm curious about this. My (perhaps innacurate?)
> understanding was that "Great Britain" was more a geographical term
> referring to everything on the islands rather than a political boundary
> (as opposed to "UK" which is purely a political concept and includes
> some, but not all, of the countries on the same islands). Is that not
> enitrely correct? Or is that exactly the the part that's uncomfortable -
> that it's a "Country" field which lacks the actual country name and only
> offers a geographic collection in its place?

Well, the wikipedia entry for Great Britain takes the clear stance that it's
the island that's Great Britain, and that when Great Britain is referred to
politically, it's the 3 countries on the island and does not include any
part of Ireland. It also lists the full name of the UK as being the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

So, technically, Ireland is not part of Great Britain at all, but sometimes,
folks do end up including Northern Ireland in what they mean when they use
the term - and plenty of folks outside of the UK probably get it wrong all
the time.

- Jonathan M Davis