A lot of people have asked me over the years how various kinds of event binding work.  Basically, event binding works like this:

1)     Someone clicks on a button,
2)     then a miracle happens, and…
3)     the button’s event handlers execute.

It’s that second step that people struggle with.

First, some terminology.  I studied applied mathematics, and somethings we talked about quite a bit were sources and sinks. Sources produce something — a faucet produces water at a certain rate, for example.  A sink takes that water away.  We’ll borrow this terminology for our discussion of events.  An event source is something that produces events, like a button or a timer.  An event sink is something that consumes events, like an event handler function.  (Event sinks are also sometimes called “listeners”, which mixes metaphors somewhat, but that’s hardly unusual in this profession.)

This terminology leads to a rather unfortunate homonymy — when I first heard “this method sinks the click event”, I heard “this method syncs the click event”.  When we talk about event sinks, we’re talking about the consumer of something, not about synchronizing two things in time.  (Sinks, of course, can be asynchronous…)

The miracle actually isn’t that miraculous.  Implementing event sources and sinks requires two things: first, a way to wrap up a function as an object, such that when the source wants to “fire” the event, all it does is invokes the sink’s wrapper.  Second, a way for the thread to detect that the button, or whatever, has been pressed and thereby know to trigger the sink wrappers.

An explanation of the magic behind the latter would take us fairly far afield.  Suffice to say that in IE, the details of how that mouse press gets translated into windows messages and how those messages are dispatched by the COM message loops behind the scenes are miracles that I don’t want to talk about in this article.  I’m more interested in those wrappers.

In the .NET world, an object that can be invoked to call a function is called a delegate.  In JScript Classic, all functions are first-class objects, so in a sense, all functions are delegates.  How does the source know that the developer wishes a particular delegate (ie, event sink) to be invoked when the event is sourced?

Well, in IE, it’s quite straightforward:

function doSomething() {  }
button1.onclick = doSomething;  // passes the function object, does not call the function

But here’s an interesting question — what if you want TWO things to happen when an event fires?  You can’t say

function doSomething() {  }
function doOtherThing() {  }
button1.onclick = doSomething;
button1.onclick = doOtherThing;

because that will just replace the old sink with the new one.  The DOM only supports “single-cast” delegates, not “multi-cast” delegates.  A given event can have no more than one handler in this model.

What to do then?  The obvious solution is to simply combine the two.

function doSomething() {  }
function doOtherThing() {  }
function doEverything() { doSomething(); doOtherThing(); }
button1.onclick = doEverything;

But what if you want to dynamically add new handlers at runtime?  I recently saw an inventive, clever, and incredibly horribly awful solution to this problem.  Some code has been changed to protect the guilty.

function addDelegate( delegate, statement) {
var source = delegate.toString() ;
var body = source.substring(source.indexOf(‘{‘)+1, source.lastIndexOf(‘}’)) ;
return new Function(body + statement);
}

Now you can do something like this:

function dosomething() { /* whatever */ }
button1.onclick = dosomething;
// … later …
button1.onclick = addDelegate(button1.onclick, “doOtherThing();”) ;

That will then decompile the current delegate, extract the source code, append the new source code, recompile a new delegate using “eval”, and assign the new delegate back.

OK, people, pop quiz.  You’ve been reading this blog for a while.  What’s wrong with this picture?  Put your ideas in comments and I’ll discuss them in my next entry.

This is a gross abuse of the language, particularly considering that this is so easy to solve in a much more elegant way.  The way to build multi-cast delegates out of single-cast delegates is to — surprise — build multi-cast delegates out of single cast delegates.  Not decompile the single-cast delegate, modify the source code in memory, and then recompile it!  There are lots of ways to do this.  Here’s one:

function blur1(){whatever}
function blur2(){whatever}

var onBlurMethods = new Array();

function onBlurMultiCast() {
for(var i in onBlurMethods)
onBlurMethods[i]();
}
blah.onBlur = onBlurMultiCast;
onBlurMethods.push(blur1);
onBlurMethods.push(blur2);

I’ll talk about VBScript and JScript .NET issues with event binding another time.

I’m on vacation for the next three weeks, so I might have lots of time for blogging, or lots of other things to do.  So if you don’t hear from me, I’ll be back in the new year.  Have a festive holiday season!

Tags JScript Scripting

Comments (11)

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1. theCoachThere is a great comic illustrating your intro in Daniel Dennett’s book “Consciousness Explained” [or possibly “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. FYI.
2. Log in to Reply
3. December 12, 2003 at 2:29 pm
4. Eric LippertI was making a deliberate reference to this famous cartoon:Is that the one you’re thinking of?
5. Log in to Reply
6. http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/miracle.gif
7. December 12, 2003 at 2:38 pm
8. Andy Smithjust thought I’d blog my take instead of leaving comments:
   http://weblogs.asp.net/asmith/posts/43205.aspx
9. Log in to Reply
10. December 12, 2003 at 3:37 pm
11. Tom TrenkaFunny you should mention this topic…I’ve just released the beginnings of an ECMAScript BCL called f(m)…and the centerpiece of this kit is….drumroll…a common Event system that handles this exact problem. Except I basically copied the .NET guys 🙂Log in to Reply
12. You can find it at http://fm.dept-z.com, and to be honest, I’d love some feedback. Why did I do it that way? Because I’ve seen a number of examples like the ones you showed above, and it looks SO ugly…
13. December 12, 2003 at 4:20 pm
14. JayHere’s my solution. It allows the delegating object to behave just like both a method AND an array of delegate methods. I used the “fn.call” syntax to allow contained methods of MulticastDelegate to access its “this” property (i.e., they become methods of the parent object as well).function MulticastDelegate()
    {
    var $d = function()
    {
    for( var ix in arguments.callee.delegates )
    arguments.callee.delegates[ix].call(this, arguments )
    }
    $d.delegates = new Array();
    $d.push = function(f) { this.delegates.push(f) }
    // add other Array methods to taste
    return $d;
    }Or, if talking about a web page:Log in to Reply
15. button1.onclick = new MulticastDelegate();
    button1.onclick.push( function() {whatever} );
    button1.onclick.push( function()
    {
    a more complex whatever
    } );
16. example = new MulticastDelegate();
    example.push( function() { println( “One” ) } )
    example.push( function() { println( “Two” ) } )
    example();
17. function println(v) { WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(v) }
18. December 12, 2003 at 6:47 pm
19. JayIf I were really putting this into production, I would also have MulticastDelegate examine it’s “arguments” and push all such elements onto the constructed array. This would allow multiple delegate functions to be added at construction time. Jay.
20. Log in to Reply
21. December 12, 2003 at 6:50 pm
22. Andy SmithAssuming a script running in a browser, there is a MUCH easier way to do all of this. But first i’ll highlight why these kinds of ideas are not always useful. Not everybody writing script that attaches to events, controls all the code on the page. assigning a custom multicast delegate doodad to SomeElement.onclick will be destroyed if some other chunk of code that doesn’t have any clue about your code just comes along and assigns it’s own function to SomeElement.onclick. Note that the code examples here do exactly that. You may be interfering with somebody else’s event handling system.This is why I think it’s better to leverage the browser here, and use addEventListener (for W3C DOM compliant browsers) and/or attachEvent ( for IE). I’ve blogged about this, with my current methodology, here: http://weblogs.asp.net/asmith/posts/30744.aspx
23. Log in to Reply
24. If you are wondering about a real-world scenario… think about asp.net server controls development. If I package some behavior in a control with script, I want to make sure that my event handling system will not be affected by the page developer or some 3rd party.
25. December 12, 2003 at 7:33 pm
26. Dan ShappirFirst a nitpick, the code should be:andAnd not as written.blah.onBlur = blur1.andThen(blur2);Another way to approach this problem using BeyondJS is event streams. Streams are objects that behave like containers, only in “time” instead of in “space”. This allows you to use list comprehensions on events:Unsurprisingly this looks a lot like your onBlurMultiCast example, only streams support lots of other list comprehensions such as filer.buttons1.onclick = alert;
    button1.onclick = addDelegate(button1.onclick, “doOtherThing();”);A third problem is that the original delegate function looses its scope (closure).Log in to Reply
27. And yes, for the browser you should simply use addEventListener or attachEvent.
28. would break because window.alert.toString() just won’t work. You could try “” + window.alert which would run, but the result still won’t work.
29. I can think of various reasons why you would dislike the addDelegate code, primarily the fact that it’s eval. Another problem is that it won’t always work. For example:
30. var st = eventStream(blah, “onBlur”);
    st.foreach(blur1);
    st.foreach(blur2);
31. andThen is implemented in such a way that you can modify the function chain dynamically. An added advantage, though not in this case, is that the value returned by blur1 is passed as an input arg to blur2.
32. Of course, had you been using the BeyondJS library you would have functional composition available, in which case you could simply write:
33. > blah.onBlur = onBlurMultiCast;
34. > button1.onclick = addDelegate(button1.onclick, “doOtherThing();” );
35. December 13, 2003 at 5:52 pm
36. David SchontzlerattachEvent has always left something to be desired, but I stopped using it awhile ago so I don’t recall what bugged me about it.
37. Log in to Reply
38. December 17, 2003 at 4:49 am
39. David SchontzlerAndy-Log in to Reply
40. Your method still requires people to conform to your function call, which is no different than the other methods. This doesn’t really fix the problem of 3rd party integration you speak of.
41. December 17, 2003 at 4:52 am
42. Brian R. JamesDo people still attach events that way? attachEvent has been around for years. Why reinvent the wheel?
43. Log in to Reply
44. December 17, 2003 at 5:10 pm

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Recall
that I defined a type as consisting of two things: a set of
values, and a rule for associating values outside of that set with
values inside the set.  In JScript .NET,
assigning a value outside of a type to a variable annotated with that type restriction
does that coercion if possible

var s
: String = 123; // Converts 123 to a String

Similarly,
I already discussed what happens when you assign a JScript array to a hard-typed CLR
array variable

var sysarr
: int[] = [10, 20, 30]; // Create new int[3] and copy

and
what happens when you assign a one-dimensional CLR array to a JScript array variable:

var jsarr
: Array = sysarr; // Wrap sysarr

But
what happens when you assign a hard-typed
CLR array to a variable annotated with a different CLR
array type?

var intarr
: int[] = [10, 20, 30];

var strarr
: String[] = intarr;

You
might think that this does the string coercion on every element, but in fact this
is simply not legal. Rather than creating a copy with every element coerced to the
proper type, the compiler simply gives up and says that these are not type compatible.
If you find yourself in this situation then you will simply have to write the code
to do the copy for you.  Something like
this would work:

function
copyarr(source : System.Array) : String[]

{

var
dest : String[] = new String[source.Length];

for(var
index : int in source)

dest[index]
= source.GetValue(index);

return
dest;

}

There
are a few notable things about this example. First, notice that this copies a rank-one
array of any element type to an array of strings. This is one of the times when it
comes in handy to have the System.Array “any
hard-typed array” type!

Second,
notice that you can use the for-in loop
with hard-typed CLR arrays. The for-in loop enumerates
all the indices of an array rather than the contents of the array. Since CLR arrays
are always indexed by integers the index can be annotated as an int. The loop above
is effectively the same as

for (var
index : int = 0 ; index < source.Length ; ++index)

but
the for-in syntax
is less verbose and possibly more clear.

Third,
you might recall that GetValue (and SetValue)
take an array of indices because the array
might be multidimensional. But we’re not passing in an array here.  Fortunately,
you can also pass only the index if it is a single-dimensional array.

Generally
speaking, hard-typed array types are incompatible with each other. There
is an exception to this rule, which I’ll discuss later when I talk about what exactly
“subclassing” means in JScript .NET.

Tags JScript .NET Scripting

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I
just wrote in a comment to my previous entry, “The ability to rate one’s knowledge
of a subject accurately is strongly correlated with one’s knowledge.”

Wait
a minute.  “One’s”???  Word’s
grammar checker didn’t blink at that.  But
nor does it blink at “ones”.  Well, according
to the OED, “one’s” is the genitive declension
of “one”.  Let’s sum up:

Pronoun   Genitive

—————–

Me        My

You       Your

Us        Our

Him       His

Her       Hers

Them      Their

Thou      Thine

It        Its

One       One’s

I
always thought that the reason that “its” doesn’t take an apostrophe-s was because
the rule “add an apostrophe-s to form a possessive” applied
only to noun phrases, not to pronouns (And of course, we all know that apostrophe-s
does not itself form a genitive noun —
otherwise, in the sentence “The First Lady is the President of America’s wife,” Laura
Bush would be associated with America, not President Bush.)

What
the heck is going on here?  Surely there
is some grammar pedant out there who can justify this.  My
faith in English grammar has been sorely tried.

Tags English Usage Non-computer Rants

Comments (28)

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1. mikeWell, let’s work backward. In the phrase “The First Lady is the President of America’s wife”, the possessive is applied to the entire phrase: “(the President of America)’s wife.” This is common; here’s a nice example: “The woman I went to school with’s daughter”. (http://www.chessworks.com/ling/papers/myths/mb003.htm) FWIW, the ability to add a possessive to a noun phrase and not just to a noun is a comparatively recent development in English: “Until well into Middle English times what Jespersen calls the ‘group genitive’, i.e. ‘[the king of England]’s’ nose did not exist, but the usual type was ‘[the king]’s nose of England’. In Old English the usual structure, before the use of the of-possessive would have been ‘the king’s nose England’s’ (http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-524.html)What’s actually interesting to contemplate is why the hell we have an apostrophe for the possessive at all. Possessive is just the genitive case; as such, it’s a normal noun declension, and has no more need for an apostrophe than the plural does. Nothing is elided with the possessive/genitive. And as noted, pronouns manage without it. German likewise has an -s for the genitive and manages without a possessive marvelously well. So whither the flingin-flangin possessive apostrophe, which does little more these days than confuse and annoy people?
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3. I have no explanation for the anomaly of “one’s” except to note that “one” is a “special” kind of pronoun since it has no direct antecedent. Unfortunately, my two most reliable sources for sussing out this kind of things are unavailable for the nonce.
4. December 2, 2003 at 8:54 pm
5. MattWell, according to Strunk & White, “The prenominal possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and ours have no apostrophe. Indefinite pronouns, however, use the apostrophe to show possession.” The example they use is “one’s rights”. Shertzer (Elements of Grammar) notes that “there is no apostrophe before the s in the possessive of personal pronouns”, which suggests that maybe you mis-remembered the rule.
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7. December 3, 2003 at 1:36 am
8. MattGah – that should be misremembered, not mis-remembered. So much for pedantry.
9. Log in to Reply
10. December 3, 2003 at 1:37 am
11. MikeUm, that would be “*whence* the flingin-flangin possessive apostrophe.” Sheesh. This comment feature needs an edit feature. 🙂
12. Log in to Reply
13. December 3, 2003 at 2:29 am
14. Eric LippertRe: whence the apostrophe?Log in to Reply
15. I was under the impression that in archaic Germanic languages like Old English, the genitive case was indicated by adding “es”, and that we elide the “e” with an apostrophe. But what I know about Old English grammar you could fit into a matchbox without removing the matches first, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I were completely misinformed…
16. December 3, 2003 at 2:54 am
17. Anonymousits doesn’t have an apostrophe because you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was the possessive or a contraction (of ‘it is’). At least that’s what I was taught in school 🙂
18. Log in to Reply
19. December 3, 2003 at 3:21 am
20. Ian GriffithsYou’re on the right track with the “e” being elided with an apostrophe – that is indeed the origin of the use of an apostrophe as the indication of the genitive.What seems to have happened is that “ites” got ellided, as frequently-used words tend to, but this happened much earlier in the history of English than the elision that happened to all other genitive forms. (Presumably because it was a widely-used word – the workhorses of a language are the ones that tend to get streamlined first, which is why the verb ‘to be’ is highly irregular in most languages.)So the progression looks like this: originally the word was “ites”, then it became “its” at a time when apostrophes were apparently not required on such elisions, and then quite a lot later, we started to elide *all* the genetive forms, but by then it was considered correct to indicate such elisions with an apostrophe.Log in to Reply
21. So “its” is an anomaly because we started eliding that long before we elided all of the other genitive forms.
22. At the time “ites” got elided to “its”, apostrophes were apparently not used to indicate elision. (As far as I can tell… I’ve not done extensive research on this by the way. But what seems clear is that apostrophes weren’t used for this particular elision.)
23. But this still doesn’t explain “its”. But that just turns out to be historical accident. The genitive form used to be “ites” – you can find a few examples of this in Old English documents of a certain age around on the web. (I forget which, but I did a search about 2 years ago the last time I had this discussion. I’m sure Google can still find them if you want to see them.)
24. December 3, 2003 at 4:22 am
25. Dan ShappirSo “its” is a case of maintaining backward compatibility 🙂
26. Log in to Reply
27. December 3, 2003 at 5:35 am
28. MikeThe issue of ellision of the vowel in genitive -es only partly explains the possessive apostrophe; the -as ending was also used for plural of masculine strong nouns in OE (nice declension and conjugation chart here: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/courses/handouts/magic.pdf), which suggests that many noun plurals once had, as they did genitive singular, an unstressed vowel to go with their -s. Granted, it has less to do with how things really were than how they were perceived to be when our not-quite-rational system of orthography was being codified. As I sort of opined earlier, IMO the apostrophe is more trouble than it’s worth for possessives; even educated people are confused about its use, if my email Inbox is any evidence. In historical linguistics, mass confusion about forms is often a prelude to an evolutionary change. 🙂
29. Log in to Reply
30. December 3, 2003 at 8:50 pm
31. MikeIncidentally and on a slightly different note, you say “My faith in English grammar has been sorely tried.” I do hope that you’re careful to make a distinction between the real grammar of English, which is splendid and about which one never need feel sorely tried, and the highly artificial rules of English orthography, which are in fact so arbitrary that you and I don’t even spell common words (e.g. “color”) the same way.
32. Log in to Reply
33. December 3, 2003 at 10:54 pm
34. Eric LippertI was being sarcastic.My bad; it is often difficult to deduce sarcasm from mere text and I was insufficiently clear. English has so many bizarre rules and bizarre exceptions to those rules that a quibble over an apostrophe in a seldom-used pronoun is hardly shocking.Log in to Reply
35. I mean, good heavens, any language in which “I would have had to have driven if I had wished to have arrived on time” — five haves! — is a perfectly sensible sentence is clearly not a sensible language! 🙂
36. December 4, 2003 at 1:04 pm
37. DanaI don’t see the need for delving into the history of elision (or “ellision,” as somebody spelled it, probably for some very good reason). It is intuitively obvious why we need an apostrophe in “one’s.” The apostrophe, for better or for worse, does indicate possession–at least, we’re accustomed to associating the two. And, oddly, we do need a non-possessive form of “one.” For example, “I want a dozen doughnuts. Give me two of those chocolate-frosted ones, and….” The apostrophe helps us distinguish between a plural and a possessive.As for grammar and/or orthography being a general pain in the neck, I have always considered that the very existence of heteronyms proves that English spelling, at least, is cruel.
38. Log in to Reply
39. As for “its” versus “it’s,” this ultimately makes sense, too. The source of the confusion is that the apostrophe in English isn’t just used to show possession, but also gets used when words are shortened (e.g., in “that’s the spirit!” the apostrophe stands in for the “i” in “is”). Since you can form a possessive of “it” and we can also contract “it is,” we need to differentiate between the possessive and the contraction by using or eschewing the apostrophe. It’s perfectly arbitrary which form gets the apostrophe–there’s a case for either–so who knows, somebody had to flip a coin at some point. Since it IS arbitrary, we just have to memorize the rule without relying on any logical reasoning to help us remember. So the more pedantic among us suck it up and remember the rule.
40. December 4, 2003 at 1:50 pm
41. Peter TorrSince the language geeks are out in force 🙂 and using lots of big words, here’s a question for you. I know that “onomatopoeia” means essentially a word that sounds like the thing it is describing, but I seem to remember there being another word that meant “words that describe themselves.” For example, “short” describes itself, but “big” does not.Log in to Reply
42. What is that word?!?
43. December 4, 2003 at 7:22 pm
44. Eric LippertThe words you’re looking for are “heterological” and “homological”, and you’ve heard of them because at some point in your philosophy minor, someone mentioned Grelling’s Paradox to you. Grelling’s paradox is a version of Russell’s Paradox. “Heterological” means “not describing itself”, ie, “long” is heterological, “polysyllabic” is homological. Is “heterological” heterological or homological?
45. Log in to Reply
46. December 4, 2003 at 7:58 pm
47. Eric Lippert> its doesn’t have an apostrophe because you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was the possessive or a contraction (of ‘it is’). At least that’s what I was taught in school 🙂That’s not how languages evolve! There are lots of hard-to-parse constructions in English — while we’re on the subject of possessives, how about “Mitzi is the owner of Fido’s sister”? Is Mitzi the sister of the guy who owns Fido, or does Mitzi own a dog, and the dog’s brother is Fido? Why hasn’t English evolved to eliminate this ambiguity?Log in to Reply
48. Rationality is occasionally a force that drives linguistic change, but the fact that we do not all speak Esperanto is a testament to the fact that it is a pretty weak force!
49. In other words, you’re asserting that the language is the way it is because otherwise it would be hard to parse?
50. December 4, 2003 at 8:56 pm
51. MikeDon’t confuse language (and language evolution) with mere reading. When you say “parse,” do you mean “read off the page” or do you mean “parse, er, tokens out of an oral stream”? Apostrophes have nothing to do with the latter, since you can’t hear ’em. cant hear em. Whatever.
52. Log in to Reply
53. December 5, 2003 at 12:31 am
54. Ian GriffithsI just want to reply to Dana’s point – I almost agree but not quite.But I don’t see how you can claim that “its” also makes sense without delving into the history of elision. It clearly flies in the face of the first rule – it’s a genitive form that sounds like it was formed in the normal way, but for which we are required by convention to omit the apostrophe. (And worse, when you look into it a bit, you discover that it also flies in the face of the second rule!)Log in to Reply
55. How can you describe “its” as intuitively obvious? Without the historical background, it’s arbitrarily and non-intuitively different from everything else.
56. Yes, “one’s” makes sense, and “it’s” also makes sense, albeit for different reasons. The former because we almost always use apostrophes to indicate the genitive, and we also use apostrophes to indicate contractions.
57. December 5, 2003 at 10:21 am
58. Peter TorrActually, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the opposite of “Heterological” is “Autological,” a word for which they do not have an entry (although it is listed under “auto” as a “combining entry”)Log in to Reply
59. One day I’m going to buy the full Oxford English Dictionary in print(http://www.oed.com/about/). There’s just something inexplicable cool about the idea of having all those words at your disposal.
60. December 8, 2003 at 9:39 pm
61. Eric LippertYou know that Microsoft has a subscription to the online OED, right? All those words ARE at your disposal.
62. Log in to Reply
63. December 10, 2003 at 12:54 am
64. Peter TorrInteresting; I did not know that. I just like thumbing through the pages though… there’s something about it that seems special. On-line dictionaries don’t have the same allure.Log in to Reply
65. Yeah, I’m a crackpot.
66. December 10, 2003 at 4:29 am
67. MarcusConfusing “its” with “it’s” is a very common mistake, but it shouldn’t be so, since once the difference is understood it’s easy to ensure that you use each once correctly.In contrast, “it’s” is always a contraction of “it is” just as “won’t” = “will not” and “can’t” = “cannot”.Just to further confuse the issue, when using names like my own (Marcus), the genitive is formed by adding an apostrophe at the end, but NOT adding the expected “s”! Thus, if you were to refer to my post, you should say “Marcus’ post” rather than “Marcus’s post”.
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69. I suspect that the source of the confusion for most people is probably that (AFAIK) no other two words in English share exactly the same letters and are pronounced the same, and yet differ in punctuation and meaning.
70. Just in case it’s not already abundantly clear, the examples stated in the original blog post without an apostrophe are in the genitive case, i.e. “its” = “of it” in the same way that “his” = “of him” and “hers” = “of her”. Naturally, English being English, these are the exceptions to the norm, since other articles (such as “one” as given earlier) DO use an apostrophe… “one’s”, “dog’s”, etc.
71. December 10, 2003 at 10:40 am
72. MarcusI posted that before I meant to…. oops!Log in to Reply
73. I failed to make clear that the rule mentioned in the last paragraph only applies to names already ending in an “s” (my own name being merely one example close to home, another being the name of my old school – Skinners’ School)… and of course the “once” in the first sentence should have read “one” instead. :p
74. December 10, 2003 at 11:05 am
75. Norman DiamondIt seems to be rather random whether English will disambiguate any particular homonyms or not.The comparison of “theirs” with “its” was incorrect. The plural of “its” is “their” with no “s”. You can say “Don’t judge English by its speakers” or “Don’t judge languages by their speakers”.Last and least, though not speaking for my employer, I will speak about my employer 🙂 🙂 :
    its’s its’s trademark.
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77. Or am I wrong. The singular of “This book is theirs” might be “This book is hers” or “This book is his”, but suppose the book is owned by a company? “This book is its’s” or what?
78. “One’s” is possessive. “Ones” is plural.
    “Whose” is possessive. “Who’s” is a contraction of “who is”.
79. December 16, 2003 at 9:55 pm
80. Eric LippertMy cat has a bowl; its bowl is empty; the empty bowl is its. My company has a building; its building is tall; the tall building is its. No problems there.
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82. December 19, 2003 at 3:52 am
83. ElbieFar be it from this one to be an expert on grammer, but this one’s opinion is that everything is as it should be.
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85. March 19, 2004 at 7:52 am
86. Mrs. NicklebeeAnd my grammar teacher dared to wonder why I struggled in her class!I’ve never heard of presidents being referred to as the President of America, fwiw.  The Canadians and Mexicans might object as they are North Americans.  We are just plain Americans but he is called the President of the United States.Log in to Reply
87. The newest comment is only more than three years old but what the hay!
88. I am no grammar queen, but  I would like to suggest that the Laura Bush sentence, “The First Lady is the President of America’s wife,” would be better stated another way:  The wife of the President of the United States is called the First Lady.  The First Lady is the wife of the President of the United States would also work.  When there is that much of an issue involving what is modifying which, isn’t it better to simply rewrite the sentence and try to eliminate the ambiguity?
89. July 12, 2007 at 11:44 am
90. Johannes LeushuisOne does not belong in the list of I, you , he etc. because one is an indefinite pronoun like somebody, anybody, everybody, nobody, while I, you , he are personal pronouns. Possessives of indefinite pronouns get “’s”: somebody’s, anybody’s, everybody’s, nobody’s, one’s, while possessives of personal pronouns do not: my, your, his, her, its, etc. Perhaps this is because the “’s” is an abbreviation of “his”: the man’s book, the man his book. Then you use that for indefinite pronouns: somebody his book becomes somebody’s book, while you do not use that for personal pronouns: my book, his book, her book etc. Perhaps the same is valid for “The book is somebody’s”, “The book is ours”?
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92. October 6, 2007 at 6:35 pm
93. Eric LippertSee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_genitive for a discussion of the “his genitive”.
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95. October 7, 2007 at 10:55 am