M
Mark McIntyre
And I didnt say you'd tried to change the topic. By the way I have read
this entire very tedious thread, despite it being hijacked by jacob.
The welcome message does that.
And I didnt say you'd tried to change the topic. By the way I have read
this entire very tedious thread, despite it being hijacked by jacob.
The welcome message does that.
J
James Hu
Sam Halliday said:
Did you read the whole answer to question 19.1 in the C-faq that I
had pointed out a couple days ago?
... Since comp.lang.c is oriented towards
those topics that the C language has defined support for, you
will usually get better answers to other questions by referring
to a system-specific newsgroup such as comp.unix.questions or
comp.os.msdos.programmer, and to the FAQ lists for these groups.
Regards,
-- James
S
Sam Halliday
James said:
oh come on... an FAQ about a newsgroup and the only mention of the topic of
discussion is hinted at in question 19.1. thats hardly what i am asking for. it
should be the very first sentence to the FAQ.
D
Dan Pop
In said:
Apart from that, the purpose of c.l.c is described, in detail, in a
message that is posted on a weekly basis, while the FAQ itself is posted
on a monthly basis.
Dan
A
Alan Balmer
The FAQ is not about the newsgroup. The FAQ is about C programming.
J
Joona I Palaste
Then why is it called the comp.lang.c FAQ and not the C FAQ?
J
James Hu
Sam Halliday said:
Nevertheless, your claim was:
and this claim is wrong. Using your editor's search function for
"topic", you would find the paragraph I quoted on the third match
out of four total.
If you are annoyed that the answer was there but you did not find it,
don't be. The C-faq is big, and contains lots of answers to lots of
other questions that are not immediately evident from the list of
questions that index it. It really should be read from start to
finish for maximum benefit.
That is not what you originally asked for.
As Dan mentions, the "Welcome to comp.lang.c!" message is posted more
frequently than the FAQ. The last posting was:
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]
I only post it every other week though.
-- James
A
Alan Balmer
If it were called the "Steve Summit FAQ", would you expect it to be
about Steve Summit?
As noted on the first line, it is content from the book "C
Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions" .
S
Steve Summit
And this is actually quite correct.
Joona I Palaste asked:
A fair question. Besides the simple fact that it's posted here,
the other main reason I've tended to leave "comp.lang.c" in the
name is as a matter of acknowledgement. Though the list is about
C programming, it owes a huge debt to the newsgroup, because that's
where the questions were distilled from, along with most of the
answers. (But if y'all wanna get huffy about it I could always
take the newsgroup out of the list's name.
)
Alan Balmer added:
Well, yes, but that really refers to "that content which was
added when the book was written." The list as posted to Usenet
came first, by a considerable margin.
Steve Summit
(e-mail address removed)
Joona I Palaste asked:
A fair question. Besides the simple fact that it's posted here,
the other main reason I've tended to leave "comp.lang.c" in the
name is as a matter of acknowledgement. Though the list is about
C programming, it owes a huge debt to the newsgroup, because that's
where the questions were distilled from, along with most of the
answers. (But if y'all wanna get huffy about it I could always
take the newsgroup out of the list's name.
)Alan Balmer added:
Well, yes, but that really refers to "that content which was
added when the book was written." The list as posted to Usenet
came first, by a considerable margin.
Steve Summit
(e-mail address removed)
S
Steve Summit
Sam said:
On the one hand, you're right, it's unfair to expect someone to
find that fact hidden there. And while the FAQ list was (to be
honest) originally written with the expectation that it be read
cover-to-cover, this too is an unrealistic and unreasonable
requirement. In fact, whenever someone scolds you for not having
noticed some salient fact hiding in a disused footnote of the
FAQ list behind a link marked "beware of the leopard", *you* can
scold *them* for not having noticed this sentence sitting right
there in the introduction:
This is a large and heavy document, so don't assume that
everyone on the net has managed to read all of it in
detail, and please don't roll it up and thwack people
over the head with it just because they missed their
answer in it.
On the other hand, though, there's a fallacy here. At other
times (i.e. when we've just emerged bloodied from yet another
horribly tedious rehash of some other tired old topic), it has
seemed like the very first sentence of the FAQ list really needed
to be "What's the story with null pointers?" or "How do I read
single characters without waiting for the RETURN key?" or "What's
wrong with void(main)?" or "Why doesn't i++-++i do what I expect?".
Comp.lang.c's FAQ list goes back quite a ways. Back when I first
started constructing it, FAQ lists covered, well, questions that
were frequently asked in a newsgroup; they did not attempt to
be comprehensive introductions to the newsgroup (or the topic),
or to enumerate the group's charter or posting guidelines or
netiquette or whatnot. And I've been pretty stubborn and/or lazy
(in the face of admittedly quite a few requests) to put that
stuff in, feeling that it belonged in a separate "Welcome to..."
document which, in the fullness to time, Billy Chambless was kind
enough to write and James has been kind enough to keep posting.
With that said, however, I do intend to add a new section 21
dedicated solely to comp.lang.c netiquette issues. (Among other
things, for better or worse, questions like "What's the group's
charter?" and "What are the posting guidelines?" and especially
"Why is everyone beating me up for posting a perfectly ordinary
question?" now *are* Frequently Asked here, sometimes seemingly
more frequently than the real questions we ought to be
discussing.) I almost wrote that new section a couple of months
ago, but I decided that completing the rest of the long-delayed
improvements ought to come first.
Steve Summit
(e-mail address removed)
D
Dan Pop
In said:
Engage your brain, Joona, engage your brain. It doesn't hurt!
The FAQ is not about the newsgroup, but it answers questions frequently
asked in the newsgroup [*], whether topical or not. How should it
be named?
[*] Or questions that were frequently asked at some time in the past and
questions perceived by its maintainer as frequently asked.
Dan
J
Joona I Palaste
Erm, the C FAQ, because it answers questions frequently asked about C?
It answers these questions regardless of *where* they are asked.
Therefore I think the C FAQ is a good name for it.
D
Dan Pop
In said:
Nope, Steve collected them from c.l.c and, most likely, he has no clue
about what C questions are asked elsewhere (imagine a C forum dedicated
to Japanese programmers, who might be facing a set of completely different
problems, or a C forum dedicated to professional embedded control
programmers).
Wrong. The source of the C questions is *relevant*. See above.
Dan