[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module

Glenn Linderman v+python at g.nevcal.com
Sun Oct 11 06:37:48 CEST 2009


On approximately 10/10/2009 9:01 PM, came the following characters from 
the keyboard of Stephen J. Turnbull:
> Glenn Linderman writes:
>  > (I switched conformant to compliant,
>
> Conformant is in common use.  You might be more comfortable with
> conforming.
>
> Richard Stallman points out that you comply with the law, but you
> conform to a standard.  I think it's useful to make that semantic
> distinction, cf. RFC 2119 MUST vs. SHOULD or MAY.
>   

conformant is not in the dictionaries I've consulted.  Conforming is 
mostly a verb, not an adjective.

Richard Stallman is a great programmer, but conformable and compliant 
are synonyms.  I don't like the word conformable, but if you appreciate 
his distinction, then we should use the word conformable even though I 
don't like it.  But we shouldn't use the letter sequence conformant, 
because although I know what you mean by it, it appears not to be a 
word, and English is hard enough for ESL folks when they can find the 
words in the dictionary.

-- 
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove.
-- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking



More information about the Email-SIG mailing list