From: Don Williams <[email protected]> Date: 03/04/2013 07:15 PM
Far too many times have I come across readers and writers (and not just IBMers) that do not understand words in a technical manual like ALL, EVERY, NONE, FIRST, LAST, AND, OR, NEITHER, EITHER, etc. need precise definitions and usages otherwise you have a novel and not reference manual. Don ------------------------ You need to work with non-IP attorneys. I can think of a famous one who was President of the USofA. Seems he needed to have someone explain to him "is". However, you are quite correct in that words, in a tech paper/article/book, must have precision of meaning. And within those who work in IT, precision is more often needed than not. Hence the USS debacle, cries of pedantry, etc. ab nauseum (I'm not that well versed with Latin). I had a class with a UCLA professor who wrote a book on architecture. I was asked to critique the book and class. I demonstrated how he had used terms interchangeably with regards to (and here I will use terms IBM-Main as a whole should be familiar with), C-Store, Real, Absolute, prefixed, and virtual. I then mentioned how I had worked at Amdahl and another computer manufacturer (competed with IBM's S3x hardware). Regards, Steve Thompson Ps. I got back a note from the professor thanking me. He noted that no-one had caught that those errors in the years he had been using that book. Opinions expressed by this person may or may not reflect those held by poster's employer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
