Ben Finney writes: > This "fail is a negative word" has already been rebutted, by native > speakers of English.
Not successfully, it hasn't. Steven d'Aprano describes one style of testing as "the test passes if it fails to fail in each of a sequence of cases." That is perfectly good English, which makes no sense if "fail" completely lacks the semantics of negation. The intuition that "fail" is a negative word is thus well-founded in standard usage. By the way, a native speaker is a person who has no need to understand how his language works; he just uses it. Being a native speaker doesn't qualify one as an authority on her language. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
