Re: [RFC] automatic apostrophes

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Bruno, et al.,

Why is this important?

I understand that it is smooth and nice to have language flow in a
natural way.  But here we are not talking about English or Catalan
composition, but about comprehensibility of messages between a program
and some human reader.  The idea is to convey some state information
to a human.  To the extent that stiltedness blocks comprehension, it
needs fixing.  Formatting text like "a %s went offline" is completely
adequate for conveying information, even if the thing that was going
offline went by a name that began with a vowel.  It does not impede
comprehension.  However, reworking a sentence so the article would not
be needed might wind up just as stilted and perhaps not as readily
understood.  Maybe that isn't a good idea either.  So, if apostrophe
misplacement and article mismatching do not impede comprehension, why
is this important?

:)  Cheers - Bruce