On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 5:37 AM, ali hagigat <[email protected]> wrote: > Why Philip Guenther wrote: "Examples cannot explain"?!!!
<sigh> I wrote "Examples cannot explain, they can only demonstrate a subset of the logic." Paul's example does not "explain the logic", it only demonstrates one particular aspect of it. Parts of a sentence can restrict the meaning of other parts of that sentence. If you take part of a sentence out of its context, it can change meaning. Doing so and then ascribing the 'new' meaning to the original author is unfair to them, as "they didn't really say that". Would manuals be better written without complex verbal structures? Probably. There will be a trade off in length and effort required. In the business world, there are people that are paid lots of money to rewrite surveys and documentation into simpler language. Training open source developers to do that would cost a lot, perhaps not in money but certainly in time, and there would be some trade off in features developed. > Paul Smith wrote an example, it was very useful in understanding the > issue. Why we did not mention the example in the manual? Perhaps it should be added...but I hope this page isn't just updated piece-meal, with an example added now, the text tweaked later, and another example added still later. If that happens, then the comprehensibility of the page will suffer as time goes on. The overall flow of the page should be considered when updates are suggested. Anyway, I'm going to shut up now because I have run out of time to spend here right now. Best wishes. Philip Guenther _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
