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

[Andres Valloud]

Google tie:

"none satisfy": 1840 hits.

"none satisfies": 1830 hits.

Andres.

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 2:08 AM, Andres Valloud <andres.valloud at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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> >
>
>
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