Re: Grammar issues

[david kerns]

English is my first language... So even though Alan's points are valid,
given the context and community usage,
I'll have to agree w/ Wolfgang. Most people I know refer to a read as
either a "blocking read" or "non-blocking read."
The underlying mechanism typically only matters to the implementers.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 10:13 PM Wolfgang Laun <wolfgang.laun@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Warning: English is not my first language.
>
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 at 23:29, Alan Welsh via Bug reports only for gawk. <
> bug-gawk@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > "Assigning a timeout value prevents read operations from blocking
> > indefinitely.
> >
> > BUT,
> >
> > The verb "block" cannot be used intransitively here,
> >
>
> Webster's appears to agree with you,
> BUT
> Googling for "concurrency" or "how to prevent blocking" finds a lot of
> places where "to block", gerund or otherwise, is indeed used
> intransitively. Examples can be found in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm. I've been reading
> the
> English literature on concurrency since 1974 and have grown accustomed to
> this arguably sloppy usage. Perhaps you could be a wee bit more tolerant in
> this case?
>
> Cheers
> Wolfgang
>