Re: [using gcc book] ch10.11 Certain Changes We Don't Want to Make

[Chris Devers <cdevers at pobox dot com>]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> Chris Devers <cdevers@pobox.com> writes:
>
> Honestly, I think Russ's suggestion downthread is better, as it makes
> clear *why* (void) would occur often enough to make the program hard
> to read if we added this warning.

Okay, I'll go with that one then.

> > My only quibble is the first person plural -- would it be fair to say "The
> > GCC development group" instead of "we"?  The GNU style guidelines I've
> > been asked to go by discourage any use of the first person, so a big part
> > of what I've been working on has been rephrasing sentences this way.
>
> Mm.  I don't like that.

*shrug*

I didn't write the docs, I'm just the guy using the docs while trying to
make the book sound like it wasn't written by a committee :)

> I think the first person *singular* should be avoided, but avoiding the
> first person plural just makes for stilted prose in my opinion.

There have been cases where I decided to leave it -- the GPL for example,
as well as the acknowledgments document. But for the mainline text, the
rule I've been asked to keep in mind is to almost always avoid it.

> (However, if mentally substituting 'the GCC development group' for
> 'we' produces an assertion about our collective opinion that doesn't
> seem tenable, there's a problem.)

No argument here. If the point has seemed at all debatable, I haven't
phrased anything that way. In fact, I've only used phrases such as 'the
GCC development group' a small handful of times -- almost always I've been
able to find some other phrasing.



-- 
Chris Devers cdevers@pobox.com
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/

Gershwin's Law
It ain't necessarily so.

    -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995