I had declined to reply to this, since the response seemed a bit hostile for what was only a benign suggestion. However, since this is specifically being discussed, here are the general reasons I suggested the approach that I did:
1) I most often encounter this sort of issue in code that isn't a string of English text containing a contraction. "Plain good english" will not suffice to prevent a regular expression or embedded quote in a sed or awk expression from tripping up Emacs. 2) In the products I work on, user-visible messages will show up in documentation, screenshots, and other places. There is always resistance to changing message output based on this reason alone. My convenience, as one of the few Emacs users, will generally not be considered a sufficient justification for a change. Unless I visit the code frequently I will generally remove my little "martian style comment" myself before submitting such code for review, which is the lowest-impact method of dealing with the issue. 3) In some of our older code, the original English format strings are used as keys in message translation for internationalization purposes. Changing them has significant overhead associated with it. Best regards, --Robert On Mar 4, 2013, at 4:19, Richard Frith-Macdonald <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 28 Feb 2013, at 10:08, Jean-Charles BERTIN wrote: > >> What is the best way of correcting this: write plain good english or add >> a martian style comment? You decide. > > Stylistically, the best english output here is to use the contraction. In > english, contractions should be used except where there is specific reason > not to. > > ie, "it's" is to be preferred over "it is", since the latter is read as > emphasising "is". This unusual emphasis breaks the flow of reading as it > prompts the reader to look for the reason for the emphasis; which is good if > there is a reason, but poor if there isn't. > _______________________________________________ Bug-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnustep
