ESL General English Grammar Questions

Re: unnecessary words

Ant_222 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:03:04 GMT

In view of it, I think I should post some Perl poetry:

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:

listen (please, please);

open yourself, wide;
  join (you, me),
connect (us,together),

tell me.

do something if distressed;

  @dawn, dance;
  @evening, sing;
  read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
  study if able;

  write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);

  ****die (like this)
  if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.

  accept (yourself, changes),
  bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;

select (always), length(of-days)

# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995

Re: unnecessary words

Clive — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:38:36 GMT

Every computer language follows its own syntactical rules, and these are not the standard grammar of the English language.

Best wishes, Clive

Re: unnecessary words

CalifJim — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:46:52 GMT

The whole point of computer code is brevity. The meaning of dispose(a) is simply "Dispose of a".

Re: unnecessary words

CalifJim — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:43:48 GMT

There must be hundreds of those "exact equivalent" 'prefix + root' patterns in Russian, but I hadn't heard of an entire proverb like that.

Re: unnecessary words

Ant_222 — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:56:52 GMT

Â«There is a well-known saying that man proposes, but God disposes.Â»

Hmmm! We have exactly the same proverb, I mean literally the same:

Man		pro~	~poses,		God	dis~	~poses
Chelovek	pred~	~polagaet,	Bog	ras~	~polagaet

Ain't that fun?

Re: unnecessary words

Ant_222 — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:52:15 GMT

Well, I mean there's the dispose(pointer) function in Pascal that releases the memory which was previously allocated with the new(pointer) function. And some OO-languages provide the dispose() method for destroying an object: a = getSomeThing;
b=a^;
dispose(a);

or

MyObject.Dispose();

Re: unnecessary words

Clive — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:38:00 GMT

Hi again,

does it happen only in programming that "dispose" means destroy and takes no prepositions??

I've never encountered this usage.

There is a well-known saying that man proposes, but God disposes. (This is a slightly different meaning of the word 'disposes'). Broadly speaking, it means that we think we control our own future, but we don't.

Clive

Re: unnecessary words

Ant_222 — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:21:54 GMT

1 â not redundant for sure. "Dispose of" is like "get rid of", while "dispose" implies a kind of destruction.

2 â although "why" is considered undesired in constructions like "the reason why I love you", in your example "why" sounds good to me, so I think it is neither wrong nor unnecessary...

EDIT: Clive: or does it happen only in programming that "dispose" means destroy and takes no prepositions??

Re: unnecessary words

Clive — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:21:28 GMT

Hi,

Please tell me if the words unerlined are unnecessary. If they are, please tell me how I can fix them, especially for the second sentence.

1. They are disposing of these things in our front lawns. The verb 'dispose' requires 'of'.

2. I think I am good and here are the reasons why. You can omit 'why', because the word 'reason' itself includes the concept of 'why'. However, people often say 'the reason why', possibly as a form of emphasis.

Best wishes, Clive

unnecessary words

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:18:07 GMT

Please tell me if the words unerlined are unnecessary. If they are, please tell me how I can fix them, especially for the second sentence.

1. They are disposing of these things in our front lawns.

2. I think I am good and here are the reasons why.