This is the mail archive of the
gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list for the GCC project.
[patch, committed] invoke.texi: clean up verb tenses
- From: Sandra Loosemore <sandra at codesourcery dot com>
- To: <gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:38:41 -0600
- Subject: [patch, committed] invoke.texi: clean up verb tenses
This installment of my series of patches to copy-edit the user
documentation for GCC addresses problems with inappropriate or mixed
verb tenses.
The manual was full of text like "GCC will frob the flapdoodle unless
--no-frob was specified." There's really very little reason to use
anything other than the present tense when describing the behavior of
the current version of GCC: the compiler frobs the flapdoodle, the
option is specified. The future and past tenses ought to be reserved
for describing actions or behavior at some explicit future or past time,
such as in a future release of GCC or in an old pre-ANSI C compiler, or
perhaps to emphasize the difference between what GCC does at compile
time and what the compiled program will do at run time.
This patch is very large, but it's also very repetitive/mechanical.
Mostly I just searched for "will", "was", "were", "would", etc and made
the necessary adjustments; here and there I rephrased sentences to avoid
an awkward verb construction. Since it's intended to be content-free,
I've committed it as obvious.
-Sandra the grammar geek
2012-04-16 Sandra Loosemore <sandra@codesourcery.com>
gcc/
* doc/invoke.texi: Copy-edit to put verbs in the present tense
when describing the current behavior of GCC.
Attachment:
gccman-verbs.patch.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data