On 12/04/2012 22:36, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Dave Korn wrote:
>> On 12/04/2012 16:47, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
>>
>>> I keep talking about useful *warnings*, you keep talking about *numbers*.
>> No you don't. You said:
>>
>>>>>>>>> People easily associates some ordering to numbers (usually
>>>>>>>>> the greater the better or in this case the worse) which
>>>>>>>>> creates another set of confusion.
>> That is talking about numbers.
>
> And you were complaining about your comments being taken out of context?
Yes, I am, because that statement of your above _was_ the context for the
whole rest of the discussion. You were interrupting in between me saying "The
situation is X" and my next sentence where I continued "Because of Y". *You*
were the one who said that the numbers were a problem because people would
expect some kind of monotonic increase in warnings related to the numbers, I
was the one who pointed out that the suggestion originally offered exactly
matched that situation.
Seriously, if you think something like this:
>> Your argument makes no sense.
>
> Do you think that assertion makes sens when no evidence is
> provided to support it?
>
>> > You said that there was a problem because
>> > people will expect numbered -W options to be ordinal.
... is anything other than a pedantic interruption in the middle of a coherent
argument, you have a communication problem. The basic unit of meaning in
English is the paragraph, you can't take part of it alone and expect it to
make sense out of context, but if you're going to accuse me of doing the same,
well, here's your entire original paragraph:
> People easily associates some ordering to numbers (usually
> the greater the better or in this case the worse) which
> creates another set of confusion. Geodelization is great
> for machines, hardly so as human interface.
There was only one extra sentence in it in the first place, and that other
sentence doesn't relate to the first sentence in any way, so I did *not* take
your idea out of any kind of context that could in any way have contributed to
its coherency. So let's get this silly subthread back on track; here's the
summary of where we're at, with all the sidetracks taken out:
>>> > -W0: no warnings (equivalent to -w)
>>> > -W1: default
>>> > -W2: equivalent to the current -Wall
>>> > -W3: equivalent to the current -Wall -Wextra
>>
>> I like this suggestion a lot.
>
> People easily associates some ordering to numbers (usually
> the greater the better or in this case the worse) which
> creates another set of confusion.
My response to that is that is not a "set of confusion", because there is
indeed an ordering to the numbers, with zero being less warnings and 3 being
most warnings, and therefore it is not a source of confusion but actually a
source of correct knowledge about what the situation actually would be, and
therefore that using -W<number> in that way would be a good idea. Now, I
admit that I have assumed you meant "source of confusion" rather than "set of
confusion", since the latter phrase means nothing in English, so if that's
where our misunderstanding has arisen, and you meant something other, then
please speak up now and make it clear what you actually meant to convey.
cheers,
DaveK
