Dear Peter, I think that the grammatical term you're looking for is "verb phrase."
Best, John On Tue, 7 Jul 2015 00:12:25 +0200 peter dalgaard <pda...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 06 Jul 2015, at 23:19 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 06/07/2015 5:09 PM, Rolf Turner wrote: > >> On 07/07/15 07:10, William Dunlap wrote: > >> > >> [Rolf Turner wrote.] > >> > >>>> The CRAN guidelines should be rewritten so that they say what they > >>>> *mean*. > >>>> If a complete sentence is not actually required --- and it seems > >>>> abundantly clear > >>>> that it is not --- then guidelines should not say so. Rather they > >>>> should say, > >>>> clearly and comprehensibly, what actually *is* required. > >>> > >>> This may be true, but also think of the user when you write the > >>> description. > >>> If you are scanning a long list of descriptions looking for a package to > >>> use, > >>> seeing a description that starts with 'A package for' just slows you down. > >>> Seeing a description that includes 'designed to' leaves you wondering if > >>> the > >>> implementation is woefully incomplete. You want to go beyond what CRAN > >>> can test for. > >> > >> All very true and sound and wise, but what has this got to do with > >> complete sentences? The package checker issues a message saying that it > >> wants a complete sentence when this has nothing to do with what it > >> *really* wants. > > > > That's false. If you haven't given a complete sentence, you might still > > pass, but if you have, you will pass. That's not "nothing to do" with > > what it really wants, it's just an imperfect test that fails to detect > > violations of the guidelines. > > > > As we've seen, it sometimes also makes mistakes in the other direction. > > I'd say those are more serious. > > > > Duncan Murdoch > > > > Ackchewly.... > > I don't think what we want is what we say that we want. A quick check > suggests that many/most packages use "headline speech", as in "Provides > functions for analysis of foo, with special emphasis on bar.", which seems > perfectly ok. As others have indicated, prefixing with "This package" would > be rather useless. However, I'm at a loss as to how to describe what it is > that we want, much less how to translate it to a dozen other languages. > > -pd > -- > Peter Dalgaard, Professor, > Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School > Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark > Phone: (+45)38153501 > Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
