Re: emacs-30 baaf97ce1a1: ; Fix some ungrammatical uses of "allows to"

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 20:00:53 +0100
> 
> It's just m4/gnulib-common.m4 I should undo, right?

No, not just that.  Quite a few m4/*.m4 files are from Gnulib.  You
need to look at the Git history to know which ones.

> Or do we not need to undo it now, and just wait for the next gnulib
> import?

We don't need to undo, but we definitely should tell Gnulib folks
about the issue.

> > More generally, "allows to" is AFAIK not necessarily a grammatical
> > mistake, it's a stylistic preference.  So this kind of changes should
> > not have been made automatically and without discussion.
> 
> It's not just stylistic -- it's certainly incorrect in American English,
> which is Emacs's dialect.

I disagree, but that is not the important aspect of this.  The
important aspect is that changing grammar should not make the text
harder to read and understand.  By mechanically changing those places
to be grammatically you definitely made at least some of the text more
awkward and hard to read.  E.g., look at this one:

  -The command @code{recover-file} no longer allows to display the diffs
  +The command @code{recover-file} no longer allows displaying the diffs

Does this really read well to you?  Or how about this one:

  -dnl The first variable allows to distinguish all three cases.
  +dnl The first variable allows distinguishing all three cases.

"Allows distinguishing"? really?

You should have instead reworded the text to avoid the use of these
constructs, making the text more clear and side-stepping the issue of
"allow to" entirely.