Re: Off-topic received English rant [WAS Re: Allow table.keyword rather than table['keyword']?]

[Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3@...>]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Gary V. Vaughan <gary@vaughan.pe> wrote:
> Nonetheless, to a native English speaker using the words ‘start' & ‘end’
> in a single phrase sounds awkward: ‘start' implies a continuous action,
> and one will normally talk about 'finishing' a continuous action, not
> ending it. This flows relatively nicely for a contrivance:
>
>   "I can start at the beginning of the race, and at the end I will have
> finished”
>
> The alternate is ugly:
>
>   “I can begin at the start of the race, and at the finish it will have
> ended"

First, I am a native English speaker. ;-) Secondly, in casual
conversation, I generally would prefer "beginning" over "start" for
noun usage. But in programming, "beginning" is quite long for an
object attribute one might need to access multiple times. "start" is
only slightly over half as long and conveys the same meaning. As long
as the attributes clearly convey the appropriate meaning, they don't
need to be perfectly grammatically correct.

>> Also, the Python "re" module's match object uses "start" and "end" for
>> this purpose. Good enough for me. :-) (Much of this "match table" was
>> inspired by Python's match objects.)
>
> An unfortunate choice that makes many people cringe a little each time they
> encounter it.  It’s not Guido’s mistake though, he was following the
> precedent of the ugly POSIX (nee BSD) regex(3) API.

Well, the primary intent of the match table was to provide a more
familiar interface for people more used to Python re matching, so...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Gary V. Vaughan <gary@vaughan.pe> wrote:
> Luckily, Nicklaus Wirth used the terms correctly in Pascal:
>
> [snip]
>
> Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan also chose the correct
> pairing:
>
>   awk -F: 'BEGIN{c=0} {c+=NR} END{print(c)}' /etc/passwd
>
> A sample from Donald Knuth’s paper about literate programming:
>
> [snip]
>
> Larry Wall, who has done a lot of seriously weird stuff with programming languages,
> is also a linguist and consequently correctly pairs begin and end:
>
> [snip]
>
> Many more…  and, no doubt there are counter examples too.
>
> Cheers,
> Gary

...all of which are verb usage, whereas Python and I use them as
nouns. And "begin" is not a noun; "beginning" is the noun, and I've
already pointed out why that's not a good idea.

(Of all the discussions I thought I might get into on this list, an
English grammar discussion was not one of them. :-)