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Re: Manual style: "non-zero" vs "nonzero"
- To: Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>
- Subject: Re: Manual style: "non-zero" vs "nonzero"
- From: Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>
- Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2001 11:20:08 -0700
- CC: "Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>, gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org
- References: <Pine.BSF.4.33.0110091958100.1398-100000@naos.dbai.tuwien.ac.at>
Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>
> On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> >> * doc/gcc.texi: Document preference for "nonzero" over "non-zero".
> > (Personally, in the case of prefix "non-" I do prefer the dash, because it
> > seems more logical and general, but as I'm not a native speaker, I defer
> > to those who are. ;-) )
>
> In fact, I have now received mails (both to the list and privately) from
> native speakers that do prefer "non-zero" as well, and also google has
> twice as many hits for "non-zero" as it has for "nonzero", so it seems
> we really should standardize on "non-zero" instead.
Bleah. Unfortunately Google doesn't distinguish literate and
illiterate usage, nor native and non-native speakers (note the
hyphen :-) ). "Nonzero" is more standard in the technical world
because the term is used so heavily. Existing uses in GCC are
about 2-to-1 in favor of "nonzero", which suggests that the group
of GCC developers already have a sense of what is preferable for
GCC.
Stan