[erlang-questions] 'cannot' /= 'can not'

[empro2@REDACTED]

Am Tue, 24 Jul 2018 10:37:43 -0700
schrieb Judson Lester <nyarly@REDACTED>:

> To be fair to Michael, there is a legitimate (albeit

Need of clarification, opposing arguments, even simple
different opinion are all fair for me; but thanks anyway :-)

I simply had not expected this, I expected: do it
yourself; people from all over the world write this, so
there are typoes; we cannot predict what that change would
result in, so never change a running documentation;
anything but 'it does not change the meaning' or 'what are
you talking about?'.


> somewhat tortured) reading of "A can not be done" as "It

Tortured? without the context? I do not want to say that the
meaning cannot be inferred from the context, it may
even be more or less obvious. After two notes stating that
it is possible to update the applications referred to
separately I expected that note to warn of it not being
possible with this one. Only experience with the Erlang
documentation made me double-check. This is not the best
example, it only made me mention the matter at last.


> is possible not to do A" that "A cannot be done" doesn't
> admit. While I read the patch notes as meaning "It is
> impossible to apply the kernel application separately", I
> can see where confusion might arise.

Can you see it here too? How much torture requires this one
from the manual on gen_statem:

	In this case OldState will be the same as State,
	which can not happen for a subsequent state
	change, but will happen when repeating the state
	enter call.

Much, I suppose, but this one with even less context:

	Note that Reason can not be an {ok,_,_} tuple

These do not really help, I should have noted down an
example of "can not" that cannot be "cannot" ... But as
things appear to be, the solution would be to paraphrase
such occurrences instead of "correcting" the other "can
not"s that can be "cannot".

Michael

--

“Even after a thousand explanations a fool is no wiser,
whereas someone intelligent requires only one fourth of
these.”

	– from the Mahābhārata (महाभारत)