Re: English Grammar question

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 4:18 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On 30.03.2011 11:08, Susanne Ebrecht wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> during translation the history.sgml - I found the following sentences in
>>
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/history.html
>>
>> "The design of the rule system at that time was described in /The design
>> of the POSTGRES rules system/
>> <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/biblio.html#STON87A>. The
>> rationale and architecture of the storage manager were detailed in /The
>> design of the POSTGRES storage system
>> <http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M87-06.pdf>/"
>>
>> I am not sure if the grammar is correct here.
>>
>> My feeling says it should be:
>>
>> "is decribed" and "are detailed" instead of "was and were"
>>
>> I am pretty sure these books still exist.
>
> Both would be correct, but with a slightly different meaning. What it means
> now is that someone wrote a description of (= described) the design in that
> book. If you change it to "is described", it means that there is a
> description on the (old) design, with nothing said about when the
> description was written.

I think this is a correct analysis of grammar - both are correct, with
slightly different meanings. I actually find both phrasings a bit
awkward, though. What we're really trying to do here is provide the
links, but that is sometimes better done in a footnote or bibliography
than in the middle of a body of text.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company