Thanks for the advice concerning the “sub” prefix. In the end I decided to go without. Now it matches the Reference. :wink:
@averykimball has joined the channel
@cdimara has joined the channel
Just realized I think “subprocess” is ok without a hyphen so :shrug:
Grammar is odd sometimes.
In Danish abbreviations are normally written with capitals. However, if the abbreviation is so common that people think of it as a word (and not as an abbreviation) then lower case is used. As an example, when the compact disc was introduced the spelling were CD - not it is cd. Another examples is “wc” for “water closet”.
Apropos, hyphens I found this list of https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hyphen/?gclid=CjwKCAiAsaOBBhA4EiwAo0_AnLDsqbni9aZYFhliF-HDks7D_gqzIrXBSyvqgNTzv2kbz_-eQvRJphoCkrEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds\|https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hyphen/?gclid=CjwKCAiAsaOBBhA4EiwAo0_AnLDsqbni9aZYFhli[…]ks7D_gqzIrXBSyvqgNTzv2kbz_-eQvRJphoCkrEQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
One quote: “Over time, many hyphenated compounds become closed compounds — teen-ager became _teenager_ for instance.”
compile time or compile-time or compiletime run time or run-time or runtime
wrong ans only
RuNTimEEEE
nonnative looks like it could almost rhyme with “cognitive,” so I bet people play it safe with non-native more often than they usually would to avoid that risk of misunderstanding
Knuth has an opinion on hyphens, <https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html|maybe I can find it somewhere>. He talks about e-mail versus email somewhere on that page. I tend to follow most of his suggestions, but recently I saw him writing “reïnforce”, which was the first time I ever saw the word written like that It must have been old writing. I’m well aware of “naïve”, say, but I had never seen “reïnforce”. (I haven’t looked it up yet to see where that comes from.) Personally, I’m more conservative than Knuth. I still write e-mail, for one, and I kinda enjoy keeping the old conventions alive. It’s fun. But I really don’t care much either way. What kinda bugs me sometimes is that, for instance, it can be tough to match two people’s styles when working together, though it’s such a minor inconvenience.
I go with the flow, though I’m not the first to go. But I don’t see much point for evolving words so quickly. We gain not much. “Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now!” I’ve always taken that as a joke like <https://cr.yp.to/sarcasm/modest-proposal.txt|this one>. So I don’t quite encourage this type of evolution.
(*) A tangent
I prefer, for instance, the advice of not using parenthesis. Here’s a clear use for us that would really trouble a more distant reader: “researchers found 154,215 damaged packets (~ 86%)”. It’s much better to write “they found 154,215 damaged packets, which is approximately 86 percent of the total number of packets”. That parenthesis and "~" are not doing anything very useful there. If it’s not important, don’t write it. If if you’d like to give the information to some readers, give it in a clear way.
Another problem I often find is with the use of acronyms. With the software we have — TeX, LaTeX, Scribble —, there is often no point in using acronyms. They often don’t help the casual reader. It’s better to use a macro and type the macro. The system will replace it and the reader won’t have to look it up. But, sure, some amount of abbreviation is useful. Mathematics and computer code often needs it.
