On Sat, 2007-07-07 at 00:48 +0100, Paul Kelly wrote: > On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Brad Douglas wrote: > > > On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 14:33 +0200, Martin Landa wrote: > >> Ciao Carlos, > >> > >> I am not sure too (it is the question for native speakers...) > >> > >> http://www.nabble.com/message-standardization-on-wiki-tf3559274.html#a9939189 > >> > >> "Cannot open raster map" X "Unable to open raster map" > > > > There is no issue with tense here. > > > > I prefer "Unable to". It's negative without being so forcefully > > negative (if that makes any sense). Either will work, but I believe > > there are fewer cases of "Cannot..." than "Unable to..." in source. > > I'm just replying to make the point how there really seems to be no > difference between the two forms: I disagree with the above and feel > "unable to" sounds much more harsh and formal than "can not", "cannot" or > "can't", which IMHO correspond more with every day speech. But perhaps > there is a American/European English difference here. In which case given > GRASS's roots the American is probably the way to go I guess? Are there > any languages into which, when translated, the two phrases mean something > substantially different?
Correct, that there is essentially no different. For me, it's a matter of flow, rather than flipping a coin. Contractions are EVIL and should not be used. That includes "cannot" and "can't". Those are both out. We're left with "Can not". I don't like it because it negates a positive, but that's my personal choice. I could care less which of the two gets used, as long as it is consistent. > In any case I think it is clearer if error messages like these (resulting > from filesystem errors) are augmented where possible with the system error > message from strerror(errno()) - see e.g. in lib/gis/copy_file.c: > G_warning( "Cannot open %s for reading: %s", infile, > strerror(errno) ); See above. > Here's a thought - to me, "unable to" suggests that the reason why > something could not be done is outside GRASS's control, and perhaps would > suit the above example from G_copy_file() better than "cannot" as the > reason (the system error message) is presented after the GRASS error. > Whereas perhaps "cannot" suggests that's simply all there is to it and > the program is unable to go into any more depth on what caused the error. > i.e. > "unable to": error/warning caused by something outside GRASS; say what it > is > "cannot": error/warning is something within GRASS that genuinely isn't > possible. > But I'm really splitting hairs here, trying to justify why we have the two > forms in GRASS. But perhaps it isn't possible to justify that... Maybe we should put it to a vote, even though it is a mundane issue. Both are acceptable choices...it's just a matter of choosing one and not looking back. -- 73, de Brad KB8UYR/6 <rez touchofmadness com> _______________________________________________ grass-dev mailing list [email protected] http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
