Subject: bug#79469: 31.0.50; Ungrammatical sentence from describe-function

From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:03:22 +0200

On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 09:00:32 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
>> Cc: Stephen Berman via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of
>>  text editors" <[email-masked]>,  Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>,
>>   [email-masked]
>> Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 01:01:29 +0200
>> 
>> On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:46:53 +0200 Joost Kremers <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 
>> > Potentially problematic, because not every word that starts with "u" gets
>> > "an". And sometimes words starting with "h" also need "an".
>> 
>> Yes, that's why I wrote in my OP: "While all three are ad hoc fixes, I
>> think the undoubted complexity of a more general fix is unjustified
>> here, because (unless I've overlooked something) `interpreted-function'
>> is the only function type symbol returned by `cl-type-of' in
>> `help-fns-function-description-header' that results in the problem
>> (since it begins with a vowel)."
>
> If we don't care about being wrong in some cases, then why fix this to
> begin with?

AFAIK there are no cases in the current code for which the fix I
proposed (in any of the variants) is wrong, and the last version is
likely to DTRT for many, if not all, plausible future additions to the
repertoire of functions type symbols.  I think a fix that would work in
all possible cases would require consulting a large wordlist (that would
have to be continually updated) and I don't think this issue justifies
implementing and maintaining such a fix.  But I do think it's better to
have a limited fix known to work with the current code base than to
leave such a silly bug in Emacs.

Steve Berman