Re: "Documentation by paper"

[Felix Lee <felix dot 1 at canids dot net>]

Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>:
> If any term yields more than 500 pages, you can almost COUNT on the
> fact that there will be subtle variations in the definition of the
> term!

well, that's true for pretty much any word in any natural
language.  it's generally expected that people can resolve
ambiguities from context (even in math papers).  and in
programming, the actual program is usually a pretty strong
disambiguator.

if all those pages refer to the same paper that defines the term,
then there's probably not going to be much variation in usage.
this can be turned into an argument in favor of "documentation by
paper", since semantic drift happens when you don't simply cite
authority, but this is getting silly.

everyone already agrees that readable code is a good thing.  it
isn't hard to handle that on a case-by-case basis.  "it took me a
while to figure out what this meant.  how about this patch for
clarity?"
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