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([2001:a61:245a:d801:2e74:88ad:ef9:5218]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id 4sm2479478wrp.58.2020.10.27.08.47.59 (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 bits=128/128); Tue, 27 Oct 2020 08:47:59 -0700 (PDT) Cc: mtk.manpages@gmail.com, linux-man Subject: Re: argz_create To: Jonny Grant References: <0b3cc00f-e0e3-deed-f3b8-5446bcaa7742@jguk.org> From: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" Message-ID: <099d5476-da34-c62c-1626-d36e54f659c0@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 16:47:58 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.11.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-man@vger.kernel.org Hello Jonny, > However "nonempty" is not an English, or American English expression > we would ever use. Even "non-empty" isn't English, we'd say "not > empty", although in this sentence there is no need to have this at > all.... > Maybe in another 50 years "nonempty" will be a word, > but for now it isn't, so the hyphen is needed. Same as "non-NULL" But "nonempty" has been a word for a long, long time. As in "nonempty set", a term you'd use in maths any day. "non-empty" (with a hyphen) occurs dozens of times in the POSIX standard, just to take an example close to home. Now, one may argue the point about the hyphen, but re "non" vs "non-" see, for example, https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0079.html Opinions obviously differ, but the tendency in English is that thyphens are going away in these cases. I think CMoS has got it right. Things like "non-NULL" are exceptional, and it's because "NULL" is a keyword in C. Now, as to whether that word "nonempty" is even needed in that sentence, I am not sure. Presumably the point isto contrast with the "(NULL,0)" tuple mentioned in the preceding sentence. In that sense, it's possibly a helpful word, though I'm not sure it's necessary. Thanks, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/