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Clarify use of contractions in diagnostic messages #116803

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Nov 20, 2024
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Clarify use of contractions in diagnostic messages #116803

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4 changes: 4 additions & 0 deletions clang/docs/InternalsManual.rst
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Expand Up @@ -160,6 +160,10 @@ wording a diagnostic.
named in a diagnostic message. e.g., prefer wording like ``'this' pointer
cannot be null in well-defined C++ code`` over wording like ``this pointer
cannot be null in well-defined C++ code``.
* Prefer diagnostic wording without contractions whenever possible. The single
quote in a contraction can be visually distracting due to its use with
syntactic constructs and contractions can be harder to understand for non-
native English speakers.
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Perhaps add the special case of cannot vs can not? Or is that already here somewhere?

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the special case of cannot vs can not?

As in?

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cannot is a formally 'correct' way of saying it, and we just had a PR committed that changed our uses.

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@Sirraide Sirraide Nov 19, 2024 •
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cannot is a formally 'correct' way of saying it

Well, ‘cannot’ and ‘can not’ mean different things, and yeah, usually, ‘cannot’ is what you want. I don’t think ‘can not’ would be too common in a diagnostic because those are typically not about something you’re allowed not to do...

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As a native speaker, (and looking in a dictionary), they are identical meaning (same as can't).

We DID have plenty of can not in both comments and diagnostics, but they were recently changed.

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they are identical meaning (same as can't).

So ‘cannot’ is identical to ‘can’t’, yes. ‘can not’ is a bit different in that the ‘can’ itself isn’t negated, but rather, the verb after it is, e.g. ‘I can not do that’ == ‘I am able / allowed to not do that’—which, arguably, this doesn’t come up too often because it’s a bit of an unusual thing to say in most circumstances, but if that meaning is intended, you’re supposed to write ‘can not’ and not ‘cannot’ (of course, from a descriptive point of view, one could argue that if people keep mistaking one for the other, there isn’t much of a point of differentiating the two, but I’m not sure we’re quite there yet).

Sorry for the rambling, but I like linguistics too much to be able to stop myself whenever topics like these come up. ;Þ

We DID have plenty of can not in both comments and diagnostics, but they were recently changed.

I definitely believe that most of those should probably have been ‘cannot’, yeah. ‘can not’ is often a typo for ‘cannot’, but it is a valid syntactic construct—provided that that’s what the writer actually intended to write, of course.

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They are also much easier to 'mis'/'mistake', so IDK if we want to point that out?


The Format String
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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