Why _ not t in the i18n class of the Lingui Core API interface?

[MurzNN]

I was confused right from the start of using Lingui, that the documentation here https://lingui.dev/ref/core recommends using the _ function instead of t.

Confused because the general convention is to use _ symbols in function and variable names to indicate that these functions are internal and not supposed to be used externally in API calls. So, all examples contain code like this:

i18n._("Hello"); // Return "Hello" in English

instead of the more readable one:

i18n.t("Hello"); // Return "Hello" in English

Lingui still provides an alias i18n.t for i18n._ that is great! But the documentation explicitly recommends using _ instead of t - could you please explain why? And would be great to explain this in the documentation, because a lot of new users face the same confusion as me!

[timofei-iatsenko]

It's by historical reasons, the _ was from the begining and all docs was written at that point of time. Later t alias was added, docs were no touched. So you can use whichever is more convinient for you.

[MurzNN]

Thank you for the details! So, maybe with the 6.0 release, it's a good opportunity to get rid of this historical quirk by swapping the aliases and making t the real function, keeping _ as an alias for backward compatibility?