Recently I went to burn a backup of the non-binaries in my c:/windows directory. The CD burner software at one point said that two of the files were open and locked by another process, so press "OK" to skip them. OK. Burn burn burn.
Minutes later, when the burning is complete, an error message in the status window: "All data was not saved".
I said "What? Nothing was written?!?"
And then I remembered: Picture the programmer as a Freshman English student. You know, the kind who writes things like "from whence", and "however it happened" when he means "however, it happened". And then it all makes sense: the programmer meant "Not all data was saved." I.e., some of the files (which it told me about) were skipped.
Re:Interesting link
jdavidb on 2002-04-11T19:14:09
That's one of my pet peeves, too! Try expressing that construction in symbolic predicate logic and see what people are actually saying compared to what they mean.
And while I'm ranting, "a lot" is two words. After all, you wouldn't say, "alittle," would you? (Been griping about this since I first saw it in 1989.)
