OpenSees Cloud

OpenSees AMI

No CAPS When You Spell the Framework's Name

Original Post - 14 Sep 2019 - Michael H. Scott

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MF DOOM is one of the greatest lyricists–of any genre–that you’ve probably never heard of. In his 2004 track “All Caps” with Madlib, DOOM explains how his stage name should be written.

All CAPS when you spell the man’s name.

MF DOOM, 2004

The preferred capitalization of OpenSees is not so clear. I often see OpenSEES, which is understandable because it stands for the Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. Less frequently, I see the all caps OPENSEES, the single capital Opensees, the txtese opensees, the hyphenated Open-Sees, and on rare occasions the possessive OpenSee’s.

Folks often ask me which capitalization is correct.

The answer to this question lies in Tcl, the first scripting language OpenSees used for model building and analysis. The Tool Command Language, has always been capitalized Tcl instead of TCL. So, when G3 became OpenSees, the development team decided to use the same capitalization pattern for System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation that is used for Tool Command Language.

The correct capitalization is OpenSees, with no repeated capital letters or hyphens.

I’ll leave this here for you to enjoy while you do some case sensitive searching and replacing.

Post updated February 13, 2021 with the HD edition of the video. See the original standard definition version.