Re: Suggestion of wording for portion of man page

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2025, at 3:07 PM, Wiley Young wrote:
> Delving into the free Writing 101 lessons here....

I would like a refund, please.


> On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 4:16 AM  Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
>> " I find Wiley's main thesis -- that this sentence reads as a sort
> of topic sentence that implicitly prefixes "alphabetic" to every
> subsequent use of "character" -- to be pretty contrived.
>
> No, it isn't that the sentence could be read that way, it's that the
> sentence can't not be read that way. It's ambiguous. Our individual
> intuitions are fallible of whether people could read something some or
> other way. The reality is that there are dictionaries and grammar rules
> that everyone has to some extent - but not fully - used to learn English.
> According to the definitions and grammar rules of English such an
> interpretation is valid, which means that people will read it that
> way, especially considering the scale.

I didn't mean to assert that your reading is impossible.  I meant
to assert that it is forced and unlikely to emerge in practice.


> The word "character," for example, as a jargon term signifying "an
> abstraction," lacks a specific definition as such within the man page.

It is true that the man page and texinfo manual do not define
"character".  (It does not mean "abstraction"; I'm not sure how you
arrived at that conclusion).  They define a handful of technical
terms and presume the reader already knows, or can look up, any
others.  There are so many technical terms that defining them all
would bloat the documentation significantly, to dubious benefit for
everyone except beginners.

By comparison, as a technical standard POSIX (IEEE Std 1003.1) must
define more or less every piece of jargon it uses.  POSIX.1-2024,
Volume 1, Chapter 3 ("Definitions") takes up 64 ANSI A pages in the
PDF version.

(Here is the POSIX definition of "character", for what it's worth:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_58)


-- 
vq