Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

* Terje Bless writes:
> You choose your level of abstraction based on the vocabulary of your
> audience. We aren't talking about people interested in "biology"
> here; we're talking about a patient seeing a doctor. Talking about
> the implementation and demanding familiarity with terminology is
> fine for budding Emacs _developers_, but it's (IMO) inappropriate
> for people who merely want to /use/ Emacs to perform some task. If
> my doctor told me I had an inflamed pharynx I wouldn't know what the
> hell he was talking about. A sore throat OTOH is perfectly
> understandable and is probably accurate _enough_ under the
> circumstances.

Since when do you choose your level of abstraction based on the vocabulary of
your audience? You choose if based on what makes sense.  In our case, a buffer
makes a perfectly good choice for a word, as you are not really opening a file,
you are opening a temporary file, a buffer.  I really don't see what this
has to do with developers, what about people that have just /used/ Emacs since
a decade back? Or people that have /used/ it for a couple of years?  A lot
of old timers would get pretty confused if you change the terminology.  And
the glossary in the Emacs manual is something that new users should read. I
also think that the tutorial describes what a buffer is in words that are
suiting new users.  Instead of changing the terminology why not improve the
definition of it so that it is easier to understand.

-- 
Alfred M. Szmidt