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

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:55:24 +0300

> Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:41:16 +0200
> From:  Stephen Berman via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <[email-masked]>
> 
> Calling `describe-function' on a noninteractive non-byte-compiled
> function produces an ungrammatical sentence in the *Help* buffer:
> 
> 0. emacs -Q
> 1. Load a non-byte-compiled file that contains a noninteractive function
>    definition, e.g. edt-user.el from the Emacs "etc" directory.
> 2. Call `describe-function' on a noninteractive function from that file,
>    e.g. `C-h f edt-setup-user-bindings RET'.
> ==> The *Help* buffer now begins with this sentence:
> 
> edt-setup-user-bindings is a interpreted-function in
> ‘~/src/emacs/emacs-master/etc/edt-user.el’.
> 
> It should say "...is an interpreted-function...".
> 
> Here are three possible fixes:

Thanks.

I think this splits hair, but if we want to do that, let's do it
right: instead of hard-coding specific words, implement a function
that produces "a" or "an" depending on the following word.  Because
tomorrow someone will add yet another function qualifier, and what
will we do then? add one more hard-coded phrase?