[MPlayer-dev-eng] Lots of stuff for NUT

[Corey Hickey]

Diego Biurrun wrote:
>>>>+    When EOR is set, all back_ptr's for this stream are set to zero.
>>>
>>>back_ptrs
>>
>>Is this rule set in stone? I've seen it many times used in either way.
> 
> Yes, it's a matter of grammar.  Plural is constructed with "s".  "'s" is
> used for the possessive case, i.e. to indicate what belong's to who
                                                            ^
It might be that you were tired or thinking about possession too much
and just made a typo, but I'll go ahead and explain the error fully
since it illustrates yet another instance of adding an 's' to the end of
a word.

Diego, please don't take this as me raking you over the coals for a
simple mistake -- I've seen other people make the same one and I think
it bears clarification. The rest of this email is directed at the
general audience, since I'm sure you already know, at least intuitively,
how all this works. Writing about grammar always makes me nervous, too,
because I know my writing will be under close scrutiny. :)

In this case, although "belong" does mean "to possess", the word is
still just a plain old verb and it gets conjugated like usual. Thus, you
mean to write "belongs", since it's the present-tense third-person
singular form of a verb.

---Definitions---
present tense:
Something that is happening now, or is currently valid. For example, the
phrase "I am hungry" is written in the present tense (and is also true).
The opposite of present tense is past tense, in which the preceding
phrase would be rewritten as "I was hungry".

third person:
Refers to someone other than the speaker. When you talk about someone
else, you speak in the third person. For example, "he writes" is a
third-person phrase. The opposite is first person, in which you refer to
yourself: "I write".

singular:
One of something. The opposite is "plural".

---Examples---
Going back to the word "belong", there are several ways to make it plural:

present-tense first-person singular: I belong
present-tense first-person plural:   we belong
present-tense third-person singular: he belongs
present-tense third-person plural:   they belong
past-tense first-person singular:    I belonged
past-tense first-person plural:      we belonged
past-tense third-person singular:    he belonged
past-tense third-person plural:      they belonged


There's a lot I didn't go over because this is complicated enough, and
even more I didn't go over because I don't know how. Suffice to say,
English is strange and complicated.

-Corey