"Thomas Schmitt" <scdbac...@gmx.net> writes: > It seems all to hang at Justin B Rye's statement > "Most English transitive verbs are pretty easygoing about > being turned into intransitives like this, > "to allow" is one of the exceptions"
> Sez who ? > http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allow > has 5 items of "transitive verb" and 2 of "intransitive verb". The intransitive meanings of allow don't mean the same thing. That's the "people should allow for personal differences" meaning of allow, which means "tolerate" or "make allowances for" or "design for." You don't want that meaning when you're trying to say that a program allows someone to do a specific thing. That intransitive form of allow is almost always used in combination with the preposition "for". It *is* possible to have a legitimate and grammatical use of the phrase "to allow" by saying something like "This program is designed to allow for a variety of uses," but it's not as common of phrasing for a package description, and it's usually a pretty indirect and unusual way of phrasing things. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
