Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

"well formed" vs. "well-formed" #1618

Closed
mclow opened this issue Apr 20, 2017 · 3 comments
Closed

"well formed" vs. "well-formed" #1618

mclow opened this issue Apr 20, 2017 · 3 comments
Assignees
@jensmaurer

Comments

@mclow
Copy link
Contributor

mclow commented Apr 20, 2017

Those seem to be used more or less interchangeably in the standard. Are they the same? If so, shouldn't they be written the same way?

"Well formed" --> 100+ uses
"Well-formed" --> 22 uses.

I can provide a list upon request.
@jensmaurer
Copy link
Member

My understanding of the rules of English grammar is that we need a hyphen if we have a compound adjective, and we shouldn't have one if it's a verb + adverb "well" combination.

For example, "a well-formed program" is a program that has a certain property (adjective), but "the program is [well] formed" does not have a hyphen ("well" is adverb; replace with "quickly" if you wish).

That said, our use of "well-formed" seems to get a life of its own as a stand-alone adjective, so the verb interpretation along "is formed well" turns out to be rather odd. We should converge to "well-formed".

jensmaurer added a commit to jensmaurer/draft that referenced this issue Apr 20, 2017
@jensmaurer
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistenly.
8146381 
Fixes cplusplus#1618.
@jensmaurer jensmaurer mentioned this issue Apr 20, 2017
Merged
@jensmaurer jensmaurer self-assigned this Apr 20, 2017
@jensmaurer jensmaurer added the decision-required A decision of the editorial group (or the Project Editor) is required. label Jul 21, 2017
@jensmaurer jensmaurer mentioned this issue Jul 21, 2017
Closed
@jensmaurer
Copy link
Member

I count only 20 or so occurrences of "well formed".

jensmaurer added a commit to jensmaurer/draft that referenced this issue Jul 21, 2017
@jensmaurer
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistenly.
5cafa0f 
Fixes cplusplus#1618.
@burblebee
Copy link
Contributor

I'm happy with well-formed. Although I think we might want to finish applying the motions before merging any PRs. Hopefully we'll be done soon...

@jensmaurer jensmaurer marked this as a duplicate of #1675 Jul 28, 2017
jensmaurer added a commit to jensmaurer/draft that referenced this issue Jul 30, 2017
@jensmaurer
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistently.
e1ba878 
Fixes cplusplus#1618.
jensmaurer added a commit to jensmaurer/draft that referenced this issue Aug 1, 2017
@jensmaurer
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistently.
58984d3 
Fixes cplusplus#1618.
zygoloid pushed a commit that referenced this issue Oct 15, 2017
@jensmaurer @zygoloid
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistently.
b07fd6c 
Fixes #1618.
AaronBallman pushed a commit to AaronBallman/draft that referenced this issue Nov 15, 2017
@jensmaurer
Use 'well-formed' (with hyphen) consistently.
b035d3e 
Fixes cplusplus#1618.
@jensmaurer jensmaurer removed the decision-required A decision of the editorial group (or the Project Editor) is required. label Sep 10, 2019
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Assignees

@jensmaurer jensmaurer

Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Milestone
No milestone
Development

No branches or pull requests
3 participants
@mclow @burblebee @jensmaurer