Re: Clueless bisect error message

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 11, 2006, 18:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20061011180449.GA2897@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <m3ejtfvwvi.fsf@defiant.localdomain>

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 02:51:29PM +0200, Krzysztof Halasa wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> > +			die "You can't bisect a seeked tree!"
> Just to make sure: dictionary.reference.com doesn't know the
> "seeked" word (I don't either though that may be normal).
> 
> Should it read "sought"? Not sure what does the message talk about.

Seeked is not a "real" word in the sense of being in any dictionary. The past participle form of "seek" is indeed "sought" (though one might want to use the passive perfect participle form "being sought" for this case).

However, the use of the word "sought" implies to me the classical definition of the word seek: "to look for something." The definition we are using here is a more modern, computer-oriented definition: "to move to a position within an ordered set" (since we are referring to Cogito's cg-seek command). Just as you might verbify (another non-word!) a command and say "I catted those files together", the tree has been "seeked." One could argue it should be "cat'd" and "seek'd" to indicate their non-word status, but that idiom is common enough among programmers, especially Unix users, that I suspect it will make sense either way.

At any rate, the word "seeked" was in the original error message, so I didn't introduce it. Are other people bothered by it?

-Peff