4 Jan
2002
4 Jan
'02
3:40 p.m.
I generally try to taylor my language to my audience, and when
communicating with humans, I have often found them to be more
intelligent than compilers, I also don't use the emoticons that many
lists seem to like as I find they remnd me too much of laugh tracks in b
movies. However, I shall henceforth correspond only in ANSI c; though if
i occasional lisp, i hope that you wont consider it an impediment. Again
my friends, I mean no offense to anyone, and apologize for any
difficulties in understanding my posts.
Thank You,
Bill Pointon
On Friday, January 4, 2002, at 06:25 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
this is not a reply to any particular message but to the thread as a
whole -- you sound like a bunch of old-fashioned high school english
Nobody is expecting postings here to be written in what English teachers
would call good 'style'. I don't think anyone would care (for example)
about using the same word in 10 sentences in a row. Or not having
exactly
the right punctuation. Or anything like that.
teachers -- i mean come on people - form follows
function - or at least
it has for the last 30 years since marshal mcluhan - if you cant
understand someones post without consulting a thesaurus grammarian and
lexicon of the english language is it worth a diatribe -- i tend to
ignore capitalization and punctuation also - save for the generic
pause -- and if you cant decipher my messages is it perhaps because
of a
failure in the reader rather than the writer ? i really dont care ----
No it's not the fault od the reader IMHO....
Let me give you an analogy.
Here's a program that looks a little like C :
itn main (int argc, car **argv)
{
printf('hello world/n"]:
)
(yes I know there are mistakes in that, that is the point).
We all know what I intended to write there. But when I try to feed that
to a C compiler I get error messages. Is that the fault of the compiler?
No, there's a standard (ANSI C) for the language that I feed into the
compiler, and that program doesn't comply with it. However, if I got
errors
compiling this program :
#include<stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("hello world\n);
exit(0);
}
(which I think does comply with the ANSI C standard) then there is a
fault with the compiler.
It's the same on this list. We have a standard (gramatically 'correct'
English) for messages here. In general that standard is interpretted
fairly loosly, so we don't have a flamewar every time somebody makes a
typo, or when somebody whose first language is not English says
something
that an English-speaker wouldn't have said. However, when 2 people can't
understand each other, then we can use the 'English Standard' to
determine which one is in error. And if the writer is not using
punctuation, then I am afraid he's the one making the mistakes.
Another point. Many messages on this list ask for help in some way.
Which
is certainly one purpose of this list. It would seem to be reasonable,
however, to make it easy for said help to be give, by (for example)
clearly stating what you are asking about and what you are asking for.
If
the helper has to spend a lot of time deciphering the message then he's
likely not to bother.
There is no point in posting a message to a public mailing list unless
you want it to be understood by other people on that list. Which means
(in the case of this list) using understandable (not necessarily
perfect)
English.
-tony