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authorbors <bors@rust-lang.org>2016-10-11 13:29:02 -0700
committerGitHub <noreply@github.com>2016-10-11 13:29:02 -0700
commit0b2c356420c155373d312f4b7063fd19983dfd20 (patch)
tree9d9a14ac0b50f2f722feeda144f71ac341cb104b /src/doc
parent304d0c8d8544ed0afcb57b32572b948fb5072f59 (diff)
parent30164c21fa0451e00b19bab22d15b9866edd97f1 (diff)
Auto merge of #37090 - GuillaumeGomez:rollup, r=GuillaumeGomez
Rollup of 9 pull requests

- Successful merges: #36679, #36699, #36997, #37040, #37060, #37065, #37072, #37073, #37081
- Failed merges:
Diffstat (limited to 'src/doc')
-rw-r--r--src/doc/book/lifetimes.md8
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/src/doc/book/lifetimes.md b/src/doc/book/lifetimes.md
index f7d9c94bc45..e865609f217 100644
--- a/src/doc/book/lifetimes.md
+++ b/src/doc/book/lifetimes.md
@@ -56,8 +56,12 @@ To fix this, we have to make sure that step four never happens after step
 three. The ownership system in Rust does this through a concept called
 lifetimes, which describe the scope that a reference is valid for.
 
-When we have a function that takes an argument by reference, we can be
-implicit or explicit about the lifetime of the reference:
+**Note** It's important to understand that lifetime annotations are
+_descriptive_, not _prescriptive_. This means that how long a reference is valid
+is determined by the code, not by the annotations. The annotations, however,
+give information about lifetimes to the compiler that uses them to check the
+validity of references. The compiler can do so without annotations in simple
+cases, but needs the programmers support in complex scenarios.
 
 ```rust
 // implicit