[clang] Clarify use of contractions in diagnostic messages (PR #116803)

[Aaron Ballman via cfe-commits]

AaronBallman wrote:

> I don’t have a very strong opinion on this if the consensus is that this is a change for the better, but as someone with a background in linguistics, I’d argue that this seems like a weird thing to discourage—I don’t think the single quote is really distracting at all if it occurs in a common contraction (e.g. isn’t, aren’t, don’t, doesn’t, etc.), because you simply parse that as one word. Of course, I don’t think we should start writing ‘you’dn’t’ve’ or anything absurd like that, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong w/ normal contractions.

It's not a significant problem, it's more a "scanning the line to see where the syntax is" problem in that it's a visual distraction if you're trying to find the variable name being diagnosed for a complex expression and there are contractions in the wording.

> > they can be harder to understand for non-native English speakers.
> 
> I also don’t think this is true: simple contractions are one of the first things we teach people, and I’ve yet to meet someone whose first language isn’t English and doesn’t know what e.g. ‘isn’t’ is supposed to mean. Is there any actual precedent for anyone being confused about this?

I am not a linguist, but this is something I've heard many times over the years when talking about writing to a multilingual audience. e.g.,

https://techcomm.nz/Story?Action=View&Story_id=394
https://www.wikihow.life/Communicate-with-a-Non-Native-English-Speaker
https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/29/tips-for-writing-for-non-native-english-speakers/
and others

That said, I would not be surprised if we could find plenty of sources saying the opposite.


https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/116803