[Skiboot] [PATCH 1/2] phb3: Refactor to move capi enable to it's own function

Ian Munsie imunsie at au1.ibm.com
Thu May 26 02:50:49 AEST 2016


Excerpts from andrew.donnellan's message of 2016-05-25 17:46:50 +1000:
> Looks good to me

Thanks for the review :)

> (apart from the two extraneous apostrophes in the title and commit
> message ;)

Personally I disagree with the notion that in modern usage "it's" can
only ever mean "it is" or "it has", and I will continue to use an
apostrophe when "it" owns something because it feels natural to me*. I
tried to compare it to the other personal pronouns, and all I wound up
with was a table full of exceptions.

Historically, "it's" was the correct usage for the possessive case
between the 17th and 19th centuries, so it should be no wonder that so
many people use it "incorrectly" by some modern attempt to define the
language.

One thing to remember to any grammar nazis out there (myself
included**), is that English as it is formalised and taught*** is
attempting to quantify something that is fluid and that has been and
will continue to change over time and is used differently in different
places and by different people (color / colour, appetizer / entrée,
etc). In other words, any definition will be never be 100% correct and
perhaps we should stop worrying so much.

English is not a programming language. It is not well defined, is not
standardised and is full of exceptions and undefined behaviour. But as
long as we understand each other it has served it's purpose (see what I
did there?).

Also consider that a language like English is full of redundancy, which
is there so that a recipient can still understand a message, even if the
message contained a spelilng erorr, localization mismatch, a historical
usage of a possessive apostrophe in it's conveyance, or eevn if erevy
wrod of fuor or mroe ltetres had all but the frsit and lsat letrets
coemepltly rreaarnegd. If you managed to read that paragraph, you just
proved that language works.



On the other hand, overly abbreviated text messages and over use of
acronyms actively remove this redundancy, and often fail to serve the
language's primary purpose if they are not understood by the recipients.

Do work to stamp those out.


Cheers,
-Ian



* Except for when I forget without realising, make an ironic typo, when
the sentence otherwise looks more natural to omit the apostrophe, or
when my language has evolved to do otherwise ;-)

** My pet peeve is correct title capitalisation. See my junk code on
github for music/correctcase.py and the over-simplified check-title.py.

*** Does anyone else think it a little ironic that Shakespeare is still
taught in English classes in school as anything other than an example of
what modern English is not?



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