Path: csiph.com!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: realloc() - frequency, conditions, or experiences about relocation? Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:09:24 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 60 Message-ID: <86r0cuk9qz.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: <875xu8vsen.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87zfrjvqp6.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87tthrvdtg.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <20240617181034.74fb4cca1f4a9a3ea032825e@g{oogle}mail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:09:43 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="d4aeba7b4aaab0d94b94221c1561c3e8"; logging-data="1308441"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+yOLNC0RjDvqKnhVRuT8FdbZHBFE8qdA4=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:zzu+i8AmkwEyN6BxS0HlLQGwnC0= sha1:i53ICkcLz00HEMeAsaGS7HB40Vs= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:386146 Anton Shepelev writes: > Ben Bacarisse to Malcolm McLean: > >> [next is a comment from Malcolm] >> >>> Your strategy for avoiding these extremes is exponential >>> growth. >> >> It's odd to call it mine. It's very widely know and used. >> "The one I mentioned" might be less confusing description. > > I think it is a modern English idiom, which I dislike as > well. StackOverflow is full of questions starting like: > "How do you do this?" and "How do I do that?" They are > informal ways of the more literary "How does one do this?" > or "What is the way to do that?" I have a different take here. First the "your" of "your strategy" reads as a definite pronoun, meaning it refers specifically to Ben and not to some unknown other party. (And incidentally is subtly insulting because of that, whether it was meant that way or not.) Second the use of "you" to mean an unspecified other person is not idiom but standard usage. The word "you" is both a definite pronoun and an indefinite pronoun, depending on context. The word "they" also has this property. Consider these two examples: The bank downtown was robbed. They haven't been caught yet. They say the sheriff isn't going to run for re-election. In the first example "they" is a definite pronoun, referring to the people who robbed the bank. In the second example, "they" is an indefinite pronoun, referring to unspecified people in general (perhaps but not necessarily everyone). The word "you" is similar: it can mean specifically the listener, or it can mean generically anyone in a broader audience, even those who never hear or read the statement with "you" in it. The word "one" used as a pronoun is more formal, and to me at least often sounds stilted. In US English "one" is most often an indefinite pronoun, either second person or third person. But "one" can also be used as a first person definite pronoun (referring to the speaker), which an online reference tells me is chiefly British English. (I would guess that this usage predominates in "the Queen's English" dialect of English, but I have very little experience in such things.) Finally I would normally read "I" as a first person definite pronoun, and not an indefinite pronoun. So I don't have any problem with someone saying "how should I ..." when asking for advice. They aren't asking how someone else should ... but how they should ..., and what advice I might give could very well depend on who is doing the asking.