[Email-SIG] fixing the current email module

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sun Oct 11 10:42:07 CEST 2009


Glenn Linderman writes:

 > conformant is not in the dictionaries I've consulted.

Try these (top 3 goggle results for "conformant"):

conformant- WordWeb dictionary definition
    (computing) conforming to a particular specification or standard "In
    this paper we present a new approach to conformant planning". Nearest
    ...
    www.wordwebonline.com/en/CONFORMANT - Cached - Similar - 
conformant - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
    conformant can be found at Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com. Click here
    to start your free trial! Click here to search for another word in the
    Merriam-Webster ...
    www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conformant - Cached - Similar - 
Conformance
    The notion of TEI conformance is intended as an aid in describing the
    format and contents of a particular document or set of documents. ...
    www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P4/html/CF.html - Cached - Similar - 

A quick look at some of the results show that the word "conformant" is
typically used in a section called "conformance", which defines what
criteria are used to determine if an application is following the
standard or not.  OTOH, the fact that the top three results are
dictionary definitions suggests an awful lot of people are looking up
the word in dictionaries....

 > Conforming is mostly a verb, not an adjective.

Goggling gives "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,680,000 for conforming
application," but " Results 1 - 10 of about 324,000 for conformant
application."  Looks like "conforming" is the preferred adjectival
form.

 > but conformable and compliant are synonyms.

When used to mean "submissive."  "Conformable" won't do.

 > English is hard enough for ESL folks when they can find the 
 > words in the dictionary.

Compliant does seem to be the winner.  "Results 1 - 10 of about
13,900,000 for compliant application."  Conformant or conforming is
better IMHO but much less popular.  Tie goes to the lusers, as usual.


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