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RE: typo in frame.el


From: Drew Adams
Subject: RE: typo in frame.el
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 16:03:05 -0700

"Uncle!" (= I give up.)

Please don't take my Friday frivolity wrong. Work to make Emacs more
text-processing-oriented for non-programmers is wonderful. Emacs is great,
and will be better still with your additions, David.

And your last paragraph is very similar to what I wrote in the beginning
(see next), so I think we (at least the two of us) can agree on "iff". My
proposal of "<=>" was in the interest of "internationalism".

Here's what I wrote earlier:

> At the very worst, someone unacquainted with the meaning of "iff" will
> likely interpret it as "if" (and as an benign typo), so there is no harm
> done in using it: (the most important) half of its meaning is always
> conveyed.

Here is the need, as I see it: something short to convey "if and only if"
(equivalence). As I don't see a universally common candidate, I suggest that
whatever convention is used ("iff", whatever) is explained in the Emacs
manual. That's all.

And, if you use an abbreviation (like "iff") in the first doc-string line,
you can always explain things more clearly in the rest of the doc string
(e.g. "if and only if").

Cheers,

  - Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of David
Kastrup
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2004 3:37 PM
To: Drew Adams
Cc: Simon Josefsson; address@hidden
Subject: Re: typo in frame.el

...

Really, I don't know why I am working on getting AUCTeX and
preview-latex to create easy interfaces to WYSIWYG LaTeX creation.  I
am working hard to provide an increasingly compelling environment also
for non-programmers for text processing.

I just fail to see what purpose <=> would serve that could not be done
otherwise.  Even "iff" is wagonloads better.  People that don't
understand that terminology are probably prone to not interpreting
"if" in the mathematical way, anyhow.  So if they consider it as a
typo and apply the everyday meaning of "if" to it instead of the
mathematical meaning, they are pretty much fine.





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