Re: Typo in perform.sgml?

Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 12:05 PM Tatsuo Ishii <ishii(at)sraoss(dot)co(dot)jp> wrote:
>> Around line 904 of perform.sgml
>> "These node types have the ability to discard subnodes which they are
>> able to determine won't contain any records required by the query."
>>
>> I was not able to parse this. Maybe "that they " is needed after
>> "determine"?

> Agreed. Also, I'm not a native english speaker either, but the
> "which" sounds weird too. How about:

> These node types have the ability to discard subnodes for which they
> are able to determine that won't contain any records required by the
> query.

Hm. A grammar purist would say that the "which" should be "that",
because it's introducing a restrictive clause. But I think the real
problem here is that "contain" is a crummy choice of verb: the notion
of a plan node "containing" records is what seems weird to me.
I think "produce" might work better. Also, there's a lot of unnecessary
words here; I think we should be trying to make the sentence shorter
not longer. How about something like

"These node types will discard subnodes when they detect that a
particular subnode won't produce any records required by the query."

Actually, that whole para could do with a rewrite; whoever wrote
it was obviously not familiar with Strunk & White's dictum
"Omit needless words".

regards, tom lane