Style question -- plural of class name?
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Wed May 8 20:13:09 EDT 2013
On Wed, 08 May 2013 15:33:07 -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> This one:
>
>> "A list of FooEntry instances"
>
> Besides the obvious spelling issues in the others, it's not immediately
> clear if the list contains just FooEntry instances, FooEntry classes
> (perhaps subclasses) or a mix of the two. #4 makes it clear.
I don't think this is a real issue. There isn't normally any ambiguity
between instances and subclasses. When you read "a list of ints", do you
assume that the list looks like [int, MyInt, AnotherInt, FooInt] or do
you expect it to look like [2, 7, 6, 1]?
The normal interpretation of "one or more Foo" is that we're talking
about Foo *instances*, not subclasses of Foo. If that is not that case,
then the onus is on the author of the documentation to make it clear that
they are talking about subclasses.
--
Steven
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