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pat-rogers / Ada-202x-WG9-Informal-Review

This is the place for WG 9 members to submit informal comments on the 202x source document. (This is not the formal ballot that WG 9 will hold later in the process.)
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A.18/2 (237.1/5) "...regular Vector" wording #78

Open pat-rogers opened 3 years ago

pat-rogers commented 3 years ago

"...regular Vector". I guess this is OK but to elderly British ears the word regular is probably normally used only in conjunction with movements of the bowel. But it has crept into common or garden British English over the years so that what were once marked as Standard packets of Cornflakes are now marked as Regular. The existing RM 2012 (as opposed to AARM) only uses regular in one place in Appendix C. However, the new wonderful Stable Containers have inserted regular in lots of places. I suppose one might say ordinary or normal. But I assume regular is perfectly acceptable.

ARG-Editor commented 3 years ago

This is a comment on A.18.2(237.1/5) (and presumably the equivalent wording in the rest of the containers).

ARG-Editor commented 3 years ago

I asked Tucker Taft about this one, and he replied:

Both "regular" and "normal" have additional meanings ("normal" means "perpendicular" in some contexts, and "regular" means to obey certain rules, such as "regular expressions"). So "ordinary" sounds good. We talk about "ordinary fixed point" so clearly we have used the term in other contexts in the RM to mean "plain vanilla," so "ordinary vectors" seems fine.

ARG-Editor commented 3 years ago

Since Tucker and I agree that "ordinary" would be better, I replaced "regular" with "ordinary" in these paragraphs. This was treated as an Editorial Review on AI12-0111-1.