It's

This is not how you say "the flour belongs to the happy goat." No, it's not 'it's flour,' it is 'its flour.' Think of it this way: when you want to say "The flour belongs to that ten year old boy over there," you wouldn't say "The flour is his's," or "that's his's flour." No apostrophe, yo. For more help with your grammar, simply ask for it.

Rephrased: "it's" is semantically equivalent to "it is". A common pet peeve in English; many people use "it's" as a possessive, which it is not.

In commenting on it, someone suggested it should be stated !strcmp("it's", "it is").

  • Coding !strcmp() (assuming the C programming language) is bad form. You're suggesting to the reader that strcmp() returns TRUE or FALSE; it does not. That's like saying the two do NOT compare, though what you're really saying is that they ARE identical. It returns the direction of comparison; a number below, equal to, or above zero.
  • Secondly, strcmp (string compare) is a literal, not a logical, comparison. The strcmp function would not return an identicality, even though the two strings are semantically the same thing in English. The writer was using the C-style == operator, but ASCII doesn't have the three-line logical equivalence symbol. The original comment was meant to be a logical, semantic comment on grammars.
  • (If the language were Perl, then use the eq operator, not ==; since both strings are equivalent to the number 0, and the latter operator considers numerical equivalents.)
  • Lastly, there is more than one way to express yourself in English. And in code. No need to re-write something YOUR way unless it's (1) inaccurate or error-prone, or (2) likely to be misunderstood by someone maintaining the work later.

Hm, I wrote grammar pet peeves, should I go religious and write programming pet peeves?

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