Re: imperative vs. descriptive style

[Bruno Haible]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> I also have the vague recollection of RMS telling people to write
> 
>    Return a list containing a and b.
> 
> instead of
> 
>    The function foo returns ...
> 
> or even
> 
>    Returns a list ...

He apparently doesn't do this any more. Recently RMS reviewed the
documentation of GNU libunistring [1]. He suggested to avoid passive voice.
But although this documentation uses the descriptive style ("Returns the ...")
consistently, he did not suggest to change that.

Bruno

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/libunistring/manual/libunistring.html