Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180106040608/@comment-31763506-20180114023340

Lostone2 wrote:

DukeLeto7 wrote:

Dear lord, some cultures have leading percent symbols?

I don't understand the question. In Spanish it makes no sense whatever.

In this case, the term "leading" means the percent symbol is at the front of the number, the opposite of the usual English setup which would be to have it at back, which would be a "trailing" percent symbol. The usage is more commonly used to refer to leading zeroes or leading and trailing spaces, and seems to be common among programmers.

Google is confused about the definition of the term and its etymology because the word "leading" has a pre-existing meaning in typography from before the programmers conquered the discipline. It meant small pieces of lead placed above and below letters of movable type to add spacing between lines.

I initially thought that the term "leading spaces" in string programming might have been an example of linguistic mutation in written manuals, with functions that were originally intended to delete typographical leading having the word leading expanded to "leading spaces" for programmers who didn't know typesetting jargon, which mutated into "leading and trailing spaces" and then "leading and trailing characters" after physical typesetting went extinct in the wild and people only read the written word in manuals rather than heard it used. (Lead and Lead are spelled the same but pronounced differently.)

Typesetters working in purely digital media still preserve the term "leading" for interline spacing, Programmers don't care much about line spacing as it applies to string manipulation, and very old languages have trim functions that are documented as deleting "leading and trailing" characters, so it's more likely that the programming usage evolved in parallel.

Regardless, direct translation of "leading" to either "esta dirigir" or "plomado" (these are almost certainly wrong) isn't going to work.