2018 edition 15-02 intro wording refinement

[kklibo]

At first glance, the sentence

We’ll explore how implementing the Deref trait makes it possible for smart pointers to work in a similar way as references.

could be interpreted to mean that smart pointers work as references. Changing the text to "in a way similar to references" or "similarly to references" would disambiguate this.

[steveklabnik]

Huh, interesting, to me, "in a similar way" is synonymous with "in a way similar to".

[kklibo]

Yeah, and while I'm not sure that the current text is grammatically wrong, it uses the preposition 'as' instead of 'to' with the adjective 'similar'. It could be ambiguous for someone who doesn't already know Rust. In its current form, the entire sentence could also be interpreted as equivalent to
"We’ll explore how implementing the Deref trait makes it possible for smart pointers to work, in a similar way, as references.", which could imply a greater equivalence between Rust references and smart pointers than actually exists.

To be clear, this is a minor tweak; reading the rest of the chapter clearly disambiguates this.