Hello fdclose

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2014, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> writes:
>> John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> writes:
>>> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> writes:
>>>> .Fn fdclose
>>>> is equivalent to
>>>> .Fn fclose ,
>>>> but the file descriptor is returned rather than closed.
>>> Yes, but this has the 'no capital letter at the start of a sentence'
>>> problem.
>> I've heard that mentioned before, but have never seen any actual rule
>> regarding it.  And we do have actual rules about avoiding redundant
>> phrases:
>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/book.html#writing-style-guidelines
>
> We always use
>
> The
> .Nm foo
> utility
>
> or
>
> The
> .Fn foo
> function
>
> instead of just .Nm or .Fn at the start of a sentence, but never (or
> rarely) within a sentence.

By "we", do you mean the FreeBSD project or your local organization?  Is 
there a specific reason the redundant wording, or is it just customary?

I suspect that usage is similar to that for an acronym, defining it on 
the first usage but only then.  Both mdoc and DocBook markup should 
accomplish the same thing.