Trailing-edge compute farm seeks gainful employment

From: bill pointon <wpointon_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Fri Jan 4 23:40:38 2002

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
>
Received on Fri Jan 04 2002 - 23:40:38 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:34:52 BST