[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Fix some typos in avfilter.h

[Ramiro Polla]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Stefano Sabatini
<stefano.sabatini-lala at poste.it> wrote:
> On date Sunday 2008-08-24 17:31:12 -0400, The Wanderer encoded:
>> Stefano Sabatini wrote:
>> > On date Sunday 2008-08-24 15:24:21 -0400, The Wanderer encoded:
>> >> Stefano Sabatini wrote:
>>
>> >>> Yes again, and I now see that my correction was outright wrong,
>> >>> anyway the way the sentence is formulated leads naturally to
>> >>> confusion, as I was reading it as:
>> >>>
>> >>> And all the references of
>> >>>     a and b,
>> >>>     and a and b
>> >>> will be deallocated.
>> >>>
>> >>> so it seemed to me just a wrong repetition, so maybe some
>> >>> reforumlation may improve its clearness.
>> >>
>> >> I can see what you're talking about. It read clearly enough to me,
>> >> but it could certainly be made less potentially ambiguous, though
>> >> I'm having a hard time of coming up with a way to do it without
>> >> using uncommon grammatical forms - something like "Also deallocates
>> >> a, b, and all references thereof.", which is technically correct
>> >> but will seem awkward to many people.
>> >
>> > What about
>> > "Also all the references of a, b, and a and b themselves will be deallocated."
>> > ?
>>
>> Because of the nature of a comma-separated list, that expands (or could
>> be interpreted by a reasonable reader as expanding) to
>>
>> "all the references of a"
>> "all the references of b"
>> "all the references of a and b themselves"
>>
>> when what we want is
>>
>> "all the references of a"
>> "all the references of b"
>> "a and b themselves"
>
> I took it literally, redundant and not very elegant, and elegance is
> for the shoemaker.
>
>> not to mention that beginning a sentence with "Also" and not having a
>> comma right after it is at least awkward and may be incorrect - and
>> including the comma would result in a too-many-commas problem.
>
> Too bad for the too-many-commas issue, that means I'm not going to win
> the literature Nobel prize for this patch...
>
>> > For what regards the second hunk:
>> > "Therefore, we have the format list structure store a pointer..."
>> >             we have the format list structure *to* store a pointer..."
>> >
>> > I know both forms are used, can you tell which is the more correct?
>>
>> Neither is grammatically incorrect, but the nuances of their meanings
>> are slightly different. I personally prefer the current form, although
>> the one in the patch you attached is also acceptable.
>
> Well, since my change is indifferent to you too then I removed the
> incriminated hunk.
>
>> > Sorry for the nitpicking, feel free to ignore this patch if you think
>> > this discussion is just a timewaste.
>>
>> Nitpicking over grammar is something I can spend quite a bit of time on;
>> I'm unlikely to get sick of it before you do, though I may not continue
>> to have enough time to keep it up.^_^ Note, however, that perfection in
>> this kind of issue can be exceedingly hard to achieve, and some might
>> argue that it isn't worth the effort for a simple code-documentation
>> comment.
>
> Very true, maybe it would have been better for the world economy if I
> wouldn't ever posted it in the first place, but having done that error
> the best thing to do seems to me just to proceed stubbornly... ;-)

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