scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit) (08/09/90)
In article <14404@diamond.BBN.COM> mlandau@bbn.com (Matthew Landau) writes: >Seems like this should be on the FAQ list, since it comes up every >couple of months. In article <151@smds.UUCP> rh@smds.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes: >Shouldn't this be in >the "most frequently asked questions" posting? and several other people have suggested the same thing. As a matter of fact, I had considered putting the do{...}while(0) trick in the list, then left it out because I didn't remember it being asked all that often. The "Frequently Asked Questions" list is at risk of turning into a "Fascinating Questions" list, which would obviously make it even longer than it already is. Its original charter was to answer the questions that got asked every month (or every week!), not to answer every question anyone could ever ask. I'm not really interested in turning it into a C textbook. (But if there are any publishers out there... :-) ) Nevertheless, I'll probably put do{...}while(0) in a future update. Ideally, besides the full, monthly posting and the "abridged" list, there would be a much longer list, available upon request, which had no compunctions about answering merely fascinating questions and no pretenses about being short. Ray Chen has set up a similar scheme on comp.sys.ibm.pc.whatever.it's.called.lately, with a mailserver to automatically dispense the longer, unposted reference stuff. I've not done that yet because mail in and out of adam is simply too unreliable at present: half the stuff I send out bounces, and I'm sure at least that percentage of the stuff you guys try to send me does so as well. If any of you archive site administrators would like to give me a public-ftp-access directory for keeping the FAQ lists and related stuff in, I'd be quite interested. (Among other things it would be nice to make available, the nroff source for the current list contains a bunch of troff codes which are invisible in the posted version but which can make it look much nicer when printed.) Steve Summit scs@adam.mit.edu