Re: static hashtable with conent?
Lew wrote:
Lew wrote:
I was referring to *professionals*. A better analogy would be
(English-language) attorneys, who are expected to do exactly that
with English, or rather the specialized form of English informally
called "legalese". If you cannot parse advanced English constructs
such as lots of subordinate clauses, you should not expect to be
paid as a legal professional.
Oh, I'm sorry, that was replete with subordinate clauses. I hope I'm
not being unreasonable in expecting people to be able to read them.
I think, though I'm not going to insist upon this (not being in a position
to do so, even were I so inclined to; Usenet, as a free medium, somewhat
paradoxically places fewer demands on the reader than a paid one does.
Having no money invested in the reading of a post leaves the reader free to
quit it at a moment's notice for any reason at all with no sense of having
lost any investment. This places a substantial burden on an author who
desires a wide audience to avoid being either dull or unpleasant. and
certainly to avoid unreasonable demands), that Patricia, whose general good
sense is, I should think, well established in these parts, at least to the
extent that a history of posts can be said to establish a picture of their
author (this being another subject which is open to debate: certainly, the
amount of time that, for instance, sarcasm goes undetected, argues that
Usenet posts are a very imperfect vehicle for communicating the sort of
subtleties by which people, in the common world of face-to-face
communication, use to form opinions of their fellows), has the right of it
here; that while the grammars that underlie both natural languages like
English and artificial languages like Java are capable of forming expression
and statements (and here we are lucky that both terms, while not synonymous
in the two realms, in this case can be used as if they were) of arbitrarily
high complexity, simply by applying the generation rules repeatedly, that in
both cases the idioms which are understood easily and naturally come from a
constrained application of those rules, and that using examples lying
outside the standard idioms places upon our readers, whose ready
understanding is in fact in our own interests as well as in theirs, an
unnecessary burden, and thus should be avoided or at least severely
minimized, absent any significant advantage to be found in their use.