> Grammar rules apart, if second has to answer a unit of 1 second, why the hell send such message to 5? Why not Time second for example?

Just syntactic sugar, similar to #asString instead of "String newFrom: ..." Iirc Kent Beck disrecommended the idea in general, but I like its convenience. :-)

Best,
Christoph

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Von: Squeak-dev <squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org> im Auftrag von Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. März 2021 08:16:51
An: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Betreff: Re: [squeak-dev] Explorer / Inspector bug?

Grammar rules apart, if second has to answer a unit of 1 second, why the hell send such message to 5? Why not Time second for example?

Le jeu. 11 mars 2021 à 02:25, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com<mailto:lewis at mail.msen.com>> a écrit :
On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 01:47:49PM +0000, Thiede, Christoph wrote:
> > "I want a two second delay" is perfectly valid :D
>
> Maybe a native English speaker can correct me but afaik, in the grammar
> dependency tree of "two-second delay", "two-second" is not an independet
> noun but a pre-modifying phrase only. Shall we really start to support
> even more different types of words in an object-oriented language like
> Smalltalk? Imho, substantives and verbs are already enough. :-)
>

I am a native Engish speaker with a poor understanding of grammar, so
that makes me a good person to attempt an answer ;-)

The use of singular "second" or plural "seconds" may depend on the
context of the expression, but in any case if I were to hear someone
say "five second" I would understand it to refer to five seconds, not
one second. If I were to try to enforce correct English (is there such
a thing? of course not), then I might try to treat "five second" as
an error. But we do not really need to enforce English syntax rules,
and in this case it is more important for the expression to do the
right thing.

So for me as an English speaker, I overlook the difference between
"second" and "seconds" and I prefer to have the expression do what
I expect in either case.

For this reason, it makes sense to me for #second and #seconds to
be treated as synonyms.

Dave


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