Can the three-syllable, two-word, pretentious Bureauspeak "prior to" please be eliminated from all tz-file comments and documentation (unless it's a quote) and universally replaced by the two-syllable, one-word "before" of identical me aning?
There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems to accrete the "including" meaning. This is not to say that changing the term is necessarily a bad thing, just that care should be taken in the replacment that it remain clear that "before" is used in the strict sense. Sometimes a sentence may need reworking beyond the proposed substitution in order to avoid confusion on this point. --Ken Pizzini