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

[BigMatt19 at aol.com]

Hello Rich,
  I am also a native English speaker.  Although I am not on the Free Pascal development team.  This seems to me to be a _very_ minor issue.  Especially since the current term fits perfectly.  "Wrong amount of parameters" is perfectly legal in the English language.  

Sorry, I just get very annoyed with those who nitpick on something so terribly trivial and have that one thing not even an issue anyway.

 - Matt

In a message dated Fri, 24 May 2002  6:06:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time, pasco at acm.org writes:

> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> fpc-pascal maillist  -  fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org
> http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal