I just walked over to our editor, Gail Pieper, and asked her the reason. She said that if the alphabets that the prefix connects are different, as in nonblocking or noncontiguous, the convention nowadays is to drop the hyphen. You would keep the hyphen in words like re-establish and also in words that would read weird without the hyphen, like non-organic (nono rganic). This is the convention followed by the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Manual, and the MLA Manual (Modern Language Association).

Also, if you do the <pick your favorit search enigne> test (I know ... but languages are dynamically changed by their users), you'll see that non-blocking seems to be the most-used term in the I/O and communication context.

Web searches are not useful for this because most people's English is not that good. Rajeev

-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Torsten Hoefler Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 3:00 PM To: MPI-3 Collective Subgroup Discussions Subject: Re: [mpi3-coll] Non-blocking Collectives Proposal Draft

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 02:49:03PM -0500, Rajeev Thakur wrote:

...

...

1) The MPI-2.1 document has 127 occurrences of "nonblocking" and only 8 occurrences of "non-blocking". What would be the correct term? Should we try to be more consistent?

The technical editor in our division prefers the version without the hyphen. She will remove the hyphen in our papers.

hmm, I would disagree - I had exactly the same discussion with our technical editor :). She explained me for 15 minutes why it is "non-blocking" and not "nonblocking" or "non blocking".

Also, if you do the <pick your favorit search enigne> test (I know ... but languages are dynamically changed by their users), you'll see that non-blocking seems to be the most-used term in the I/O and communication context.

I'm open for arguments!

Best, Torsten

-- bash$ :(){ :|:&};: --------------------- http://www.unixer.de/ ----- Torsten Hoefler | Postdoctoral Researcher Open Systems Lab | Indiana University 150 S. Woodlawn Ave. | Bloomington, IN, 474045, USA Lindley Hall Room 135 | +01 (812) 855-3608 _______________________________________________ mpi3-coll mailing list [email protected] http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/mpi3-coll