Re: The Second Great Spelling Check (Re: Package descriptions and making them better)
On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 08:51:49PM -0800, David Schleef wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 11:39:21PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > 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.)
This is an English language standard; it's just a coincidence that it's
applied correctly in many scientific disciplines. ;)
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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