[RELEASE] 4.2.0 announcements and preliminary tarballs

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 01/10/05 03:46, Randy Chung wrote:
> Matt Thompson wrote:
> >
> >Well, I see a few things that I might change, text-wise.  First, "easy
> >to use and platform independent" to "easy-to-use and
> >platform-independent".  Some English majors might want to check that for
> >me, but that's how this chemist would write it.  Another hyphenate I
> >often use is bleeding-edge, but that is not always done.  (There are a
> >few other "easy-to-use" as well that adjectives in II.)
> 
> easy-to-use and platform-independent seem to be more marketing gimmicks 
> than anything, IMO.  "easy to use" very plainly (and very simply) 
> describes something, and doesn't require hyphenation.  You could 
> possibly argue that people expect it to be hyphenated just because 
> marketing's pushed it for so long, but as it is, it seems fine to me.

actually, there's a valid reason for this unrelated to marketing.  if
you're saying "product X is easy to use", you'd likely not use the
hyphenation, but, if you're using it in an adjectival list, you probably
would hyphenate, to better distinguish items in the list: "product X is
green, large, easy-to-use, friendly, and quite wealthy.  the concept here
is the "adjective phrase".  "easy-to-use" in this context is a single
entity.  actually, the main only reason *not* to use the hypenation (as
in the first) case, is because people tend not to like hyphens.  there's
a great book about english punctuation in general - "eats, shoots, and
leaves" by someone i can't remember - that's a must-have for anyone who's
as anal about punctuation as i am.

	-brian