On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Fred Drake <[email protected]> wrote:
> The point of carefully defined terminology is primarily to make sure > that relatively formal communication, such as technical documentation, > can be carried out both effectively and efficiently. There's no need > to dictate terminology for casual communication, where context is > usually sufficient. Fred Drake said: > The point of carefully defined terminology is primarily to make sure > that relatively formal communication, such as technical documentation, > can be carried out both effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, formal terminology imost useful when it agrees with common usage; after all, we also want informal discussion (such as we have on distutils, everyday work, user groups, etc.) to be effective and efficient. In this case the formal terminology is so cumbersome that people tend not to use in technical documentation. >There's no need > to dictate terminology for casual communication, where context is > usually sufficient. Ah, well we can't dictate that anyway, can we? This is a negotiation, not an attempt to dictate. People will say what they want to say. The goal here is to improve the formal terminology and change it in the documentation, in such a way that informal discussions are more likely to adopt the formal terminology and to be consistent with the documentation. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
