[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Fix some typos in avfilter.h

[The Wanderer]

V?ctor Paesa wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The Wanderer said:
> 
>> Stefano Sabatini wrote:

>>> Yes again, and I now see that my correction was outright wrong,
>>> anyway the way the sentence is formulated leads naturally to
>>> confusion, as I was reading it as:
>>> 
>>> And all the references of
>>>     a and b,
>>>     and a and b
>>> will be deallocated.
>>>
>>> so it seemed to me just a wrong repetition, so maybe some 
>>> reforumlation may improve its clearness.
>> 
>> I can see what you're talking about. It read clearly enough to me,
>> but it could certainly be made less potentially ambiguous, though
>> I'm having a hard time of coming up with a way to do it without
>> using uncommon grammatical forms - something like "Also deallocates
>> a, b, and all references thereof.", which is technically correct
>> but will seem awkward to many people.
> 
> What about "And all the references of a and b, and a and b themselves
> will be deallocated" ?

That form has what I can only describe as a comma imbalance, and still
has the "beginning a sentence with 'And'" problem. It also, like the
current form, has a tense imbalance with the preceding sentence - the
preceding sentence has the present-tense "Returns", where this has the
past-tense "deallocated".

One possibility, which seems wrong from the perspective that the comment
is describing the return value of the function and only incidentally
covering the other effects, might be

==
Returns format list which contains the intersection of the formats of a
and b, and deallocates a, b, and all references of either.
==

but that has too much commage, and I don't see a way to fix it without
splitting into two sentences again (e.g. with "Also deallocates", etc.).

I think I'm not at my best as a grammarian at the moment. I may be able
to come up with something better later on, but it's not necessarily
worth waiting for perfection.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.