Re: The Second Great Spelling Check (Re: Package descriptions and making them better)

[David Schleef <ds@schleef.org>]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 11:39:21PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> - Word joining
> 
>   Technical terms seem to lend themselves to the formation of new words
>   through joining, e.g. "lowlevel", "mousewheel", "bugreport".  In cases
>   where the joined form is a common technical term, I allowed it, and in
>   most other cases I recommended hyphenation or splitting into two words.
>   The rationale was to allow for keyword searches to work as expected, so
>   there were few hard and fast rules.


FWIW, the standard in (some, many?) scientific disciplines is to
hyphenate combination adjectives, but to not use hyphens with combination
nouns.  Thus, you might have a bug report on a low-level driver.  It
seems to be a pretty good policy, as it appears to minimize the number
of ambiguities.  (Yes, I realize that checking for this is quite
difficult.)



dave...