On Wednesday 24 August 2005 10:46, Fergus Wilde wrote:
Bit sad to lose track of the use of English (for native speakers, at least) among people using computers, who ought to be well aware of the need for precision and syntactical correctness from their command line experience.
Unfortunately there is a large number of people who are spending inordinate amounts of time trying to teach computers to be vague and human in their understanding. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before a computer starts accepting "pf" instead of "ls" "because their binary language version sounds the same"
I'm sure the reason 'would of' and 'should of' upset you so much is because those two really do show that the writer can't tell a verb from a preposition and are thus much more badly lost than those merely baffled by the few simple rules surrounding the use of the apostrophe.
Actually, the primary reason why it gets up my nose is that it just looks horribly ugly, aesthetically speaking. Your reason is good too though :) But I'll shut up about it now