On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 2:42 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentr...@enterprisedb.com> wrote: > On 16.03.22 02:25, Kyotaro Horiguchi wrote: > > Hello, this is a derived topic from [1], summarized as $SUBJECT. > > > > This just removes useless hyphens from the words > > "(crash|emergency)-recovery". We don't have such wordings for "archive > > recovery" This patch fixes non-user-facing texts as well as > > user-facing ones. > > Most changes in this patch are not the correct direction. The hyphens > are used to group compound adjectives before nouns. For example, > > simple crash-recovery cases > > means > > simple (crash recovery) cases > > rather than > > simple crash (recovery cases) > > if it were without hyphens.
I agree with that as a general principle, but I also think the particular case you've chosen here is a good example of another principle: sometimes it just doesn't matter very much. A case of crash recovery that happens to be simple is pretty much the same thing as a case of recovery that is simple and involves a crash. My understanding of English grammar is that one typically does not hyphenate unless it is required to avoid confusion. A quick Google search suggests this example: Mr Harper had a funny smelling dog We must try to figure out whether the smell of the dog is funny or whether the dog itself is both funny and smelling. If we hyphenate funny-smelling, then it's clear that it is the smell of the dog that is funny and not the dog itself. But in your example I cannot see that there is any similar ambiguity. Recovery cases can involve a crash, and crash recovery can have cases, and what's the difference, anyway? So I wouldn't hyphenate it, but I also wouldn't spend a lot of time arguing if someone else did. Except maybe that's exactly what I am doing. Perhaps I should find something else to do. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com