Fedor Zuev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Documentation in not a software.
This has been refuted so many times. What about help2man, which turns software into documentation? What about the numerous other times documentation is embedded into source code or source code is embedded into documentation? What about literate programming? > There is no any one-way transformation from the source to the binary. It so happens that I do a lot of work for Project Gutenberg, and have experience in this matter. Our output - no output I've seen to anything meaningfully called source - is not convertable into the original. We lose a lot of book related detail, and even stuff that may or may not be relevant like fonts and font sizes. The original in this digital age is maybe the result of a lossy conversion from an original that was marked up with content orientated tags to a paper format or a more presentation orientated format. HTML -> ASCII loses information and has no reliable reverse transformation even for the information it doesn't loose. On the flip side, the transformation from the source to the binary for programs is not one-way. You can turn that binary back into source - look at dozens of Java disassemblers, and the theory is the same for any source->binary language. > if you can read the document, you always, technically, can OCR it. No. OCR programs only work at DPIs and quality levels much higher then the human threshold. And only if they can get images, which is may be hard to do for a proprietary reader. 72 or 100 DPI isn't high enough to OCR from, anyway. > it takes no more than 24-48 man\hours to completely OCR a > large 500-700pages book. For a simple novel, yes. A computer software manual would be much harder. How long would it take to turn ls back into a reasonable facsimile of the source code? Probably not a whole lot longer, given a skilled programmer. A simple quantitive difference does not a qualitative difference make. ______________________________________________________________________ Do you want a free e-mail for life ? Get it at http://www.email.ro/
