From owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Wed Jul 23 19:23:10 2003 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by dkuug.dk (8.12.8p1/8.9.2) id h6NHNAvF014020 for sc22wg5-domo; Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:23:10 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk) X-Authentication-Warning: ptah.dkuug.dk: majordom set sender to owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk using -f Received: from mailhub.dfrc.nasa.gov ([130.134.81.12]) by dkuug.dk (8.12.8p1/8.9.2) with ESMTP id h6NHLYEc014004 for ; Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:23:06 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from maine@altair.dfrc.nasa.gov) Received: from mail.dfrc.nasa.gov by mailhub.dfrc.nasa.gov with ESMTP for sc22wg5@dkuug.dk; Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:18:37 -0700 Received: from altair.dfrc.nasa.gov ([130.134.20.211]) by mail.dfrc.nasa.gov (Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-71686U2500L200S0V35) with ESMTP id gov for ; Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:21:24 -0700 Received: by altair.dfrc.nasa.gov (Postfix, from userid 201) id AB00A35184; Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:21:19 -0700 (PDT) From: Richard Maine MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <16158.50191.612251.355126@altair.dfrc.nasa.gov> Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:21:19 -0700 To: WG5 Subject: (SC22WG5.2890) New papers In-Reply-To: <200307231652.h6NGq3i1013869@dkuug.dk> References: <200307231652.h6NGq3i1013869@dkuug.dk> X-Mailer: VM 7.07 under 21.4 (patch 12) "Portable Code" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Precedence: bulk John Reid writes: > Glossary. Why have all the italics been removed? I suggest: > > 427:6. Add 'Where the definition uses a term that is itself defined > in this glossary, the first occurrence of the term in that definition > is printed in italics.' [F95 words] > > Glossary: restore the italics. [Makes it clearer.] I strongly object to this for multiple reasons. Note that the italics were removed by explicit J3 vote quite some time back. 1. They did not, in my opinion, make it clearer. Seemed like half of the glossary was italic, which doesn't help much. In my view, it just made it harder to read because of the constantly changing typeface. 2. It wasn't done consistently and was a maintenance nighmare. Pretty much nobody ever marked the italics when doing edits to the glossary. And not one person *EVER* noted places in other definitions where italics should be added or removed when they added or removed a definition. As a result, the f2k draft wasn't even close to actually following the above rule. A few years ago I pointed this out and noted that we either needed to fix it so that the glossary actually followed that rule or take the rule out. I had recommended taking the rule out and that passed by a substantial J3 vote (I don't recall whether it was unanimous or not, but it was at least a substantial majority). 3. It would be a very large number of changes. It is easy to describe, but we are talking many hours of work to identify exactly which words meet the above description and then to make the edit. It is also enough changes that typos are all but unavoidable. This would be a lot of work. -- Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience; Richard.Maine@nasa.gov | experience comes from bad judgment. | -- Mark Twain