[fpc-pascal]Compiler uses bad English: "amount" vs "number"

Rich Pasco pasco at acm.org
Sat May 25 00:04:48 CEST 2002


I appreciate that English is a second languge for most of the
Free Pascal authors, and I don't mean to criticize, but as a native
English speaker, I would like to suggest a correction to one of the
compiler error messages.

The message is "Wrong amount of parameters specified"
It would be better to say "Wrong number of parameters specified"

The reason is that in English, "amount" is used to measure a real
number, a continuously-variable quantity (e.g. "the amount of water
in the bucket") whereas "number" is used to measure an integer, a
countable quantity (e.g. "the number of tennis balls in the bucket").

Since the error message refers to a countable, integer quantity,
it should refer to the "number of parameters" not the "amount."

I hope this is helpful, and thank you again for an excellent product.

     - Rich






More information about the fpc-pascal mailing list