"Documentation by paper"

[Daniel Berlin]

On Feb 3, 2004, at 4:26 PM, Robert Dewar wrote:

> Steven Bosscher wrote:
>
>> You can leave out an explanation of what a dominator is and still
>> be self-contained.  What's next, do we have to explain what a finite
>> automaton is in the sources of GCC?
>
> It's definitely worth defining what a dominator is, since this is
> indeed a term that is not used in absolutely identical manner by
> all compiler papers.

Pardon?
This is certainly an interesting claim.
I've never seen a compiler paper that didn't define a dominator as 
"Node V dominates Node U if every path from start to U contains V" 
(excluding s/Node/Vertex/ and s/start/entry/)

I think if they did, the author would likely be ridiculed and possibly 
beaten.
--Dan