On Thu, 8 Sep 2005 10:52:50 -0600 Paul E Condon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For some products, Stephen's position is simply silly. Consider, > for example, a Boeing 747. Another example is a C compiler. Certainly, those are two complicated products (in comparison to some other not so complicated products) to use. The average user, upon visiting a 747 cockpit, just sees a morass of levers and dials and other things and has no clue what to do (witness several Hollywood films where non-pilots are talked down from the ground crew, for intance). Having no "Flying 747s for Dummies" book handy, one would arguably find oneself lost. But (and I am not a pilot) these planes may be easier to fly than many other models - especially with computerized navigation, autopilot and so forth. A C compiler is perhaps more relevant to this discussion, and it permits me to interject a point. When the average user wants to compile "Hello World", for instance, doing it by reading "man gcc" often does not prove useful. Why? Because "man gcc" (as many other man pages for Unix systems) lists all possible ways to use "gcc". In practice, most users will not use nearly all those options, and somewhere, buried in the man page, there exist instructions on how to compile a simple program: $ cc -O -o hello hello.c (or even simpler, remove the -O) Man pages (generally) don't progress from simple usages to more complex ones - they present in toto everything all at once. I saw that early on by reading "man bash". > Paul E Condon > [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
