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From: msb@sq.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Should answers be posted or mailed?
Message-ID: <1987Jul7.181904.5970@sq.uucp>
Date: Tue, 7-Jul-87 18:19:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: sq.1987Jul7.181904.5970
Posted: Tue Jul  7 18:19:04 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Jul-87 05:09:45 EDT
References: <1601@oliveb.UUCP> <1038@watmum.UUCP> <414@sol.ARPA> <1033@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: msb@sq.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto
Lines: 54
Checksum: 58966
Summary: Mailed.

One point of view:

> >PLEASE MAIL RESPONSES LIKE THIS.
> >There must be a thousand readers of this newsgroup that can answer questions
> >like this.  If everyone posted an answer ...

Another point of view:

> Quite the contrary!  Many of us read this newsgroup to learn more about
> using C. ... We appreciate ... those who answer the questions and help us ...
> Unless the original poster explicitly says that he will post a summary of
> responses, respondents should continue to post answers.

I think the first poster is completely right.  I have been known to post
answers to questions myself, but only when I feel immodest enought to think
I can answer them better than other posters are likely to*, or if there
have been no postings after several days but the arrival of other news
indicates that we do not have a feed problem.  Generally I do use mail.

But, to avoid the problem mentioned by the second poster, I also generally
include with my mail a note something like this:

   "I expect that several people will answer your question.  If nobody
    has posted to the net about it by the time this mail arrives, please
    post something yourself, such as this message."

That is, when someone does not say "please send mail, I'll summarize",
I assume it is because they forgot to do so, or didn't appreciate the
tremendous load on the net that some questions can lead to.  (The kill and
search features of rn are NOT a solution to overload, only a workaround.)

Unfortunately, there is some correlation between C expertise and net expertise.
(I immodestly claim a goodish amount of both.)  Net experts in general
tend to already know the above arguments and not to post unnecessarily.
Net novices may be swayed by the opposite point of view.  The result is
that a question may evoke more posted responses from C novices or
semi-novices than from C experts, and if the point is particularly tricky,
more wrong answers may be posted than right!

If everyone would mail their answers, at least only the original questioner
would be confused by the responses...:-)

A hint to any novices reading this... if the poster is (in alphabetical
order) me, Doug Gwyn, Guy Harris, Karl Heuer, Dennis Ritchie, Henry
Spencer, or Chris Torek, then you can almost surely believe whatever
their article claims as fact, no matter what you thought about it.

*Case in point: the "static char (*b)[6];" discussion.  Of all the articles
 about the various type-errors and -misconceptions, I don't think there were
 more than two that pointed out that the wrong value was being copied in
 the assignment b=d -- it should have been *d.  My article did.

Mark Brader		"Not looking like Pascal is not a language deficiency!"
utzoo!sq!msb							  -- Doug Gwyn