Re: Unhyphenation of crash-recovery

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 2:42 AM Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On 16.03.22 02:25, Kyotaro Horiguchi wrote:
> > Hello, this is a derived topic from [1], summarized as $SUBJECT.
> >
> > This just removes useless hyphens from the words
> > "(crash|emergency)-recovery". We don't have such wordings for "archive
> > recovery" This patch fixes non-user-facing texts as well as
> > user-facing ones.
>
> Most changes in this patch are not the correct direction. The hyphens
> are used to group compound adjectives before nouns. For example,
>
> simple crash-recovery cases
>
> means
>
> simple (crash recovery) cases
>
> rather than
>
> simple crash (recovery cases)
>
> if it were without hyphens.

I agree with that as a general principle, but I also think the
particular case you've chosen here is a good example of another
principle: sometimes it just doesn't matter very much. A case of crash
recovery that happens to be simple is pretty much the same thing as a
case of recovery that is simple and involves a crash. My understanding
of English grammar is that one typically does not hyphenate unless it
is required to avoid confusion. A quick Google search suggests this
example:

Mr Harper had a funny smelling dog

We must try to figure out whether the smell of the dog is funny or
whether the dog itself is both funny and smelling. If we hyphenate
funny-smelling, then it's clear that it is the smell of the dog that
is funny and not the dog itself. But in your example I cannot see that
there is any similar ambiguity. Recovery cases can involve a crash,
and crash recovery can have cases, and what's the difference, anyway?
So I wouldn't hyphenate it, but I also wouldn't spend a lot of time
arguing if someone else did. Except maybe that's exactly what I am
doing. Perhaps I should find something else to do.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com