Re: To non-native English writers: expunging the solecism "This allows to do something."

[Phillip Lord]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> You missed some instances, which I found by running rgrep on the Emacs
>> source tree with this regexp (without the quotes):
>
>> "[^-]\(allow\|enable\|permit\|prevent\|require\)[^-de ]* to "
>
> Yes, I'd overlooked "require"; but there are instances of "requires to"
> which are OK.  The regexp I ended up using was:
>
>     '\b\(require\|allow\|prevent\|permit\|enable\)s\? to\b'
>
> , and some fancy playing around with -A1 and -B1 flags to grep to find
> instances (and there were a few) where the verb is at the end of a line
> and the "to" at the beginning of the next line (modulo comment markers,
> etc.).
>
>> This does, however, also return several false positives, most of them
>> with "require" (one is written as `require' and one or two of the others
>> should probably be quoted like that).  I don't have time in the next few
>> days to commit a fix for these, so if you do, please go ahead.
>
> Well, I've knocked down quite a few more instances.  I can't guarantee
> there're none left, of course, but there aren't many.


Can't we build this into checkdoc in some form?

Phil