Re: Motion 62: YES (with minor amendment)
On 2014 Jun 23, at 17:05, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2014-06-23 11:08:56 -0400, Ian McIntosh wrote:
>> Standards and most technical documents should entirely avoid any use of
>> "comprise", since it has two meanings that are almost opposites. One is
>> that the parts comprise the whole, the other is that the whole comprises
>> the parts. Words that have been corrupted into their opposites should be
>> abandoned. Using them compromises clarity.
>
> Note that P1788 defines its meaning in §1.5:
>
> – comprise indicates members of a set are exactly those objects
> having some property. An unqualified consist of merely asserts
> all members of a set have some property, e.g., “a binary
> floating-point format consists of numbers with a terminating
> binary representation”. “Comprises” means “consists exactly of”.
I changed "of a set" to "of a set or list" because about half the uses are about lists (including character sequences).
> but I'm not against a change (for this one, as you suggested below,
> and possibly others). In particular, I think that
>
> "The implementation may comprise a programming language as well as
> extensions in the form of libraries, classes, or packages that are
> necessary to satisfy the requirements for conformance."
>
> is a bad use of "comprise", because the "exactly" doesn't make much
> sense with "may".
>
>> I propose "It consists of those subsets...".
I agree it's a bad use, and changed "comprise" to "include". Does that catch the meaning correctly?
I looked at all uses of "comprise" and they looked OK except in §7.3 I changed "Its common inputs comprise those..." to "Its set of common inputs comprises those...", which seems more precise grammar.
(SVN rev 370)
John Pryce