[ANSI-Smalltalk] List of interesting methods, Collection only

[Andres Valloud]

Wikipedia says:

Syntactically, "none" is singular. If you think of it as "no one", then it's
clear - "no one (of these things) satisfies the conditions". It's not the
same as pointing to a group of things and saying that the entire group fails
to satisfy; rather, it's looking at each member of the group separately, and
saying "A does not satisfy; B does not satisfy; C does not satisfy ......
and Z does not satisfy". But that's a bit laborious to spell out. So to
shorten it, we could say "No single one satisfies", or shorter yet, "None
satisfies". But grammatically, it can be either singular or plural, and
grammar is not necessarily related to syntax or even to logic, but more to
actual usage, euphony and peer pressure. It helps to know your target
audience. Some would raise their eyebrows at "none satisfy"; others would
have the same reaction to "none satisfies".

Then there are some examples in which none is used with satisfy, but to me
those don't count because none is used as a qualifier to some other subject
which is plural, namely:

For most people *none* can be either grammatically singular or plural
depending upon the semantics (this is what is called *notional agreement*).
So, we have
 *None of the rice has been eaten* (singular *none* because *rice* is
singular, noncount)
*None of the mice have been eaten* (plural *none* because *mice* is plural,
count)
So I think the selector we choose depends on how we read it.  For example,
do we read

someCollection noneSatisfy: aBlock

like this?

"none of the objects in the collection satisfy aBlock"

Or like this?

"no object in the collection satisfies aBlock"

Given that both are acceptable, I'd have a (biased I am sure) tendency to
choose noneSatisfies:.

Andres.


On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:51 AM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini at gnu.org> wrote:

> Andres Valloud wrote:
> > Oops!  Thank you for the correction.
>
> Actually both are correct.  I asked on
> http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Language (search for
> "None") and started a tiny flame war. :-)
>
> I now prefer #noneSatisfy: too for compatibility.
>
> Paolo
>
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