Documentation cleanup issues

Kai Henningsen kaih at khms.westfalen.de
Wed Dec 4 06:53:00 UTC 2002


davidsen at tmr.com (bill davidsen)  wrote on 03.12.02 in <asj1pp$6ol$1 at gatekeeper.tmr.com>:

> In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0212022333250.8548-100000 at puck.litech.org>,
> Jeffrey M. Vinocur <jeff at litech.org> wrote:

> | I also tried to standardize a bunch of stuff which was inconsistent; for
> | example I always use a comma before "and" in lists like "x, y, and z".
> | People hold varying views on this sort of thing, but I figured standard
> | was better than not.
>
> AFAIK that's more correct, although the comma is optional. I was always
> taught to use it if there were more than two items ("a and b" or
> "a, b, and c."

I learned that as one of the differences between English and German - in  
German, and replaces comma, in English, if there's any comma everything  
should have one. Though, of course, the major comma difference is that in  
German, the rules are rather hard (not completely without options,  
though), whereas in English, the rules are rather soft (more like "put a  
comma where it feels good to you").

> | - There's still a lot of use of "wildmat" (instead of "uwildmat") in
> |   casual text; do we mean to change completely or only in direct
> |   references to the library routine?
>
> I would think that wildmat refers to the method and uwildmat to the
> implementation thereof, if that makes sense in context.

Think of it as "sort" vs. "qsort(3)". Incidentally, it might make sense to  
replace uwildmat with uwildmat(3) and use "where does that make sense" as  
a guide to decide between that and wildmat.

MfG Kai


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