I agree it's a bit off-topic, but I find too many people use apostrophes. Style manuals differ in their recommendations, but I tend to fall into the camp that suggests apostrophes should not be used unless absolutely necessary.
The best thing for the programming case, where you want to avoid confusion between the precise symbol name and the pluralized version, is to change the font style used for the symbol. That is, write the symbol in a monospaced font, and append an "s" without apostrophe in the font style of the surrounding text. Obviously this is hard to do in email. My take is that it's probably pretty easy to deal with this imprecision most of the time, and too often I need to indicate actual possession or contraction with those symbols. So, I never use an apostrophe to pluralize. I don't use apostrophes on acronyms, or numbers, either. One style manual suggests an apostrophe only if periods are used, and not if not. In any case, far too many people use far too many apostrophes when pluralizing, and it's causing me to make more such mistakes just from constantly reading theirs. Please stop. -- Rick On Jun 24, 2013, at 13:21 , Howard Moon <how...@antarestech.com> wrote: > Now we're straying off into grammar, but… > > How about adding a word to indicate that you're talking about objects, as in > "std::map objects" or "multimap objects"? > > (I'd rather be clear than save a few keystrokes any day.) > > -Howard > > On Jun 24, 2013, at 1:00 PM, Alex Zavatone wrote: > >> Awesome. Thanks. In today's world, so many people don't seem to pay >> attention to proper use of the apostrophe, that I thought I'd ask rather >> than assume. >> >> Noting this, is it wise(r) to actually use (s) to indicate a plural in this >> case? >> >> >> On Jun 24, 2013, at 9:33 AM, Roland King wrote: >> >>> it's a not-uncommon usage in the programming world where the apostrophe >>> separates the actual name of the thing from the 's' denoting a plural and >>> it means 'more than one std::map'. I've seen this one for years, along with >>> std::map(s) but that takes one extra character to type. >>> >>> On 24 Jun, 2013, at 9:23 PM, Alex Zavatone <z...@mac.com> wrote: >>> >>>> Scott, your use of the apostrophe is confusing, since those terms don't >>>> appear to be possessive or contractions >>>> >>>> Instead of : >>>>> std::map's of >>>> >>>> >>>> and >>>>> multimap's of >>>> >>>> >>>> Did you mean >>>> >>>> std::maps of >>>> >>>> and >>>> >>>> multimaps of ? >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Jun 24, 2013, at 9:06 AM, Scott Ribe wrote: >>>> >>>>> On Jun 23, 2013, at 7:51 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> I'd have to do some more thinking as to whether that is a weakness in >>>>>> CoreData or not, but it seems to be erring in the ER direction. >>>>> >>>>> Hmm. My own private ORM has no such pointers--instead using methods which >>>>> rely on std::map's of primary keys to ids, and multimap's of primary keys >>>>> to foreign keys... >>>>> >>>>> -- > > _______________________________________________ > > Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) > > Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. > Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com > > Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: > https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/rmann%40latencyzero.com > > This email sent to rm...@latencyzero.com -- Rick _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
