[Lazarus] Error messages: cannot versus can't

[Giuliano Colla]

Il 17/10/2014 12:52, Reinier Olislagers ha scritto:
> On 17/10/2014 12:50, Giuliano Colla wrote:
>> Il 17/10/2014 12:21, Reinier Olislagers ha scritto:
>>> On 17/10/2014 12:16, Mattias Gaertner wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:58:21 +0200
>>>> Reinier Olislagers <reinierolislagers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Googling gives lot of pages saying that cannot is more formal than
>>>> can't. And MS Word prefers cannot over can not.
>>>>
>>>> This means: It depends on the target audience of your application.
>>> Yes, formal versus informal is part of it. Another part is
>>> comprehension, e.g.
>>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb226825%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
>>>
>>> "Avoid contractions in technical messages. They can slow down
>>> comprehension."
>>>
>> In my experience Microsoft should be taken as a guideline of what *not*
>> to do.
>> The inventors of the well known dialog: Abort, Retry, Ignore should not
>> have voice on what is user friendly and what's not.
> I disagree. The link I posted shows sensible advice.
>
> If you have better references, as I said, I'm very interested!

Once said that "can't" is less formal, and therefore preferable in a 
short message window, which is more akin to spoken language than to 
formal written language, I can only testify my personal experience.

In many decades of activity I've been in touch with field engineers, 
sales people etc. from a lot of countries. The vast majority of them 
weren't (were not;-) ) native English speakers, and some of them had a 
lot of pain in writing a simple English sentence. But it never occurred 
to me a single misunderstanding because of a "can't" not understood or 
misinterpreted. Being "can't" very frequent in my e-mails (they usually 
ask for features which either can't be done for free, or can't be done 
at all), I draw from my direct experience the conclusion that "can't" 
does not possibly "slow down comprehension" as Microsoft geniuses claim.

Giuliano

-- 
Giuliano Colla

Project planning question: when it's 90% done, are we halfway or not yet?