On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:20:26 -0800, Carroll, Barry wrote: > It took me about 3 seconds to realize that Mr. D'Aprano' Q&A session was > laid out bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom. After that, it made > perfect sense.
Three seconds, compared to about thirty milliseconds if it were written in the normal fashion. That's an inefficiency of about two orders of magnitude. Multiply that by a few hundred news posts and emails that you might read in a day, and, well, I think that makes it a big deal. That means top posting is to effective communication what exchange-sort is to quicksort. I use the analogy advisably: just as there is overhead to quicksort that makes it slower for sufficiently small lists, so there is overhead to in-line posting that makes top posting easier for the reader under quite restricted circumstances: you're reading the posts in order, and the entire thread (or at least the relevant parts of it) are still in short term memory. > While it was a excellent way to demonstrate his > argument, it failed to prove his point, because, while top-to-bottom may > be the way he reads things, it isn't the way _everyone_ reads things. There are, as far as I know, no human languages that write from the bottom of the page upwards. But even if there are such languages, we're on an English language newsgroup, not Martian, and so we should (whenever possibly) adapt English conventions. > So, as far as I'm concerned, post your posts in whatever manner works > for you. If it's in English, I'll figure it out. If not, well, there's > always Babelfish. ;^) Or perhaps I should say: .snoitnevnoc hsilgnE tpada )ylbissop revenehw( dluohs ew os dna ,naitraM ton ,puorgswen egaugnal hsilgnE na no er'ew ,segaugnal hcus era ereht fi neve tuB -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list