jborlin@athena.mit.edu (James B. Orlin) (06/30/87)
In article <414@sol.ARPA> crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes: ... (gives example of short response to syntax question that several people have posted to the net) ... >PLEASE MAIL RESPONSES LIKE THIS. > >There must be a thousand readers of this newsgroup that can answer questions >like this. If everyone posted an answer to an individual instead of replying >through mail, this news group would be useless. Post only that which is of >general interest to everyone. The answers to this type of question are of >interest to those that asked, and few others. Quite the contrary! Many of us read this newsgroup to learn more about using C. If the question is asked, there are probably readers who either could answer it with some work, but not off the tops of their heads, or who would have no hope of answering it at all. We appreciate the effort of those who answer the questions and help us to improve. Unless the original poster explicitly says that he will post a summary of responses, respondents should continue to post answers. Those who are advanced enough to be bored by the answers can always have rn skip the messages on these simple topics.
msb@sq.UUCP (07/08/87)
One point of view: > >PLEASE MAIL RESPONSES LIKE THIS. > >There must be a thousand readers of this newsgroup that can answer questions > >like this. If everyone posted an answer ... Another point of view: > Quite the contrary! Many of us read this newsgroup to learn more about > using C. ... We appreciate ... those who answer the questions and help us ... > Unless the original poster explicitly says that he will post a summary of > responses, respondents should continue to post answers. I think the first poster is completely right. I have been known to post answers to questions myself, but only when I feel immodest enought to think I can answer them better than other posters are likely to*, or if there have been no postings after several days but the arrival of other news indicates that we do not have a feed problem. Generally I do use mail. But, to avoid the problem mentioned by the second poster, I also generally include with my mail a note something like this: "I expect that several people will answer your question. If nobody has posted to the net about it by the time this mail arrives, please post something yourself, such as this message." That is, when someone does not say "please send mail, I'll summarize", I assume it is because they forgot to do so, or didn't appreciate the tremendous load on the net that some questions can lead to. (The kill and search features of rn are NOT a solution to overload, only a workaround.) Unfortunately, there is some correlation between C expertise and net expertise. (I immodestly claim a goodish amount of both.) Net experts in general tend to already know the above arguments and not to post unnecessarily. Net novices may be swayed by the opposite point of view. The result is that a question may evoke more posted responses from C novices or semi-novices than from C experts, and if the point is particularly tricky, more wrong answers may be posted than right! If everyone would mail their answers, at least only the original questioner would be confused by the responses...:-) A hint to any novices reading this... if the poster is (in alphabetical order) me, Doug Gwyn, Guy Harris, Karl Heuer, Dennis Ritchie, Henry Spencer, or Chris Torek, then you can almost surely believe whatever their article claims as fact, no matter what you thought about it. *Case in point: the "static char (*b)[6];" discussion. Of all the articles about the various type-errors and -misconceptions, I don't think there were more than two that pointed out that the wrong value was being copied in the assignment b=d -- it should have been *d. My article did. Mark Brader "Not looking like Pascal is not a language deficiency!" utzoo!sq!msb -- Doug Gwyn