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I prefer the nuance of "might" here, as we're talking about a thing that might unfortunately happen to an unsuspecting programmer, not something they can choose to do.
I wonder if that's a good barometer in general: using "can" to discuss risks seems like it has the wrong nuance.
We have multiple instances where "might" is used to call out a risk, not a possiblity.
Additional feedback on "might" => "can" changes:
This note to me sounds like it's directed at the programmer, not the implementation, and the change from "might" to "can" reverses that. So this is at least a change in nuance.
[Re "f might throw" vs "f can throw" or "it is possible for f to throw":] This is stating something as fact that is not known to be true -- we don't know whether it's possible for f to throw because we haven't seen its definition. (There's a surprisingly subtle difference between "X might Y" and "it is possible for X to Y" here.)
This is a tracking issue for a discussion that arose from the "could"/"might" wording changes.
We initially proposed replacing "might" with "can" in several cases, but this has a different nuance that might not be desirable.
As @zygoloid puts it:
We have multiple instances where "might" is used to call out a risk, not a possiblity.
Additional feedback on "might" => "can" changes:
See the discussions in #4384 for context.
I expect that we will want to rephrase the offending phrases more widely than by just replacing one word with another.
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