Rationale for my posting draft V7 C description

Dan Bernstein brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu
Thu Nov 22 06:38:18 AEST 1990


No technical content.

In article <1990Nov20.173322.18533 at dg-rtp.dg.com> goudreau at dg-rtp.dg.com (Bob Goudreau) writes:
> In article <9770:Nov2004:40:4490 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu>,
> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> > > No.  He was talking about the cross-posting of this discussion to
> > > comp.std.c, which certainly *is* dedicated to ANSI C.   You did notice
> > > that the original guy had listed comp.std.c as well as comp.lang.c
> > > in his "Newsgroups" line, didn't you?
> > No, I didn't. If Ron hadn't thought that his comments were appropriate
> > for comp.lang.c, why would he have set followups to this group?
> Geez, that was exactly the point:  to move the discussion *out* of
> comp.std.c (where it didn't belong) and into comp.lang.c (where it
> is appropriate).

That's exactly my point. He was moving the discussion into comp.lang.c,
so his comments about ``this thread is inappropriate for this group''
applied to comp.lang.c. And that's what I disagreed with.

The article was cross-posted to comp.lang.c and comp.std.c, with
followups to the former. Obviously the poster thought the subject of the
article belonged in comp.lang.c. The subject of the article was the
claim that ``X is inappropriate for this group.'' How can ``this group''
apply to anything but comp.lang.c?

> > There's no reason I should have looked at the original newsgroups.
> There's no excuse for not paying attention to *all* the contents
> of an article, including its header.

Really? I don't spend time thinking about the Path unless I care what
path the article took. I don't spend time thinking about the Newsgroups
unless I care what the original newsgroups were. I usually accept the
last poster's judgment about where a discussion belongs; if he thinks it
belongs in comp.lang.c, and then refers to ``this group'' without
further qualification or explanation, why shouldn't I assume he's
referring to comp.lang.c?

---Dan



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