rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (05/19/84)
>> For heaven's sake, isn't there something more interesting to talk >> about? > >Hell, yes. *Anything* would be more interesting to talk about than >religious arguments about the "right" place to put tokens on "paper". Agree also - but here's a meta-point: The fascination with "where to put the tokens on paper" has flooded another medium in the past - good old SIGPLAN Notices. The editor (Richard Wexelblat, out there somewhere) made an exception to the general rule of printing anything which is civil and relevant - in January 84 he announced that he would print no more articles on prettyprinting. What had happened (my personal viewpoint) is that people had started using SIGPLAN as a means to get something in print - and you can almost always find some reason to disagree with someone else's conventions. We saw a flood of articles on how to format (mostly Pascal and Pascal-like-language) programs, most of which were crap that reduced to "My way is better because I like it so I do it my way." The most amazing fact about the whole thing was not Wexelblat's action but the fact that there wasn't a flood of letters saying "let's cut the crap and get back to real work." -- ...A friend of the devil is a friend of mine. Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303) 444-5710 x3086