From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2000-02-15T02:29:29-06:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01373] Ruby Language Reference Manual--Glossary

I was going to print the Ruby Language Reference Manual when I noticed that
it was a bunch of files, one of them being a glossary that I had somehow
never seen before.

It turns out that the glossary is not shown in the index, and the only (?)
link to it appears at the very end of the BNF page, labeled "next". There is
no "next" link at the top of the page.

There is this interesting entry under "D":

    document

    The one that matz is really bad at. He always says ``the source itself
should be the document. It even describes bugs perfectly.'' But no one
agrees.

It would help if someone explained that the reason that no one [else] agrees
is that so many bugs are execution context dependent, rendering the source
an incomplete and thus imperfect description of such sorts of bugs.

This remark reminds me of Ralph E. Griswold (the co-developer of Snobol4 and
the developer of Icon), who used to refer to source code as "the formal
semantics". (I just realized in reading Matz's comment that the source code
obviously contains its own "formal arguments" for Griswold's terminology.)

Anyway, can the apparently long-neglected and little-seen Glossary be linked
to the Table of Contents?

Also, does anyone have a ruby program that will cleanly combine multiple
html file documents into one file to facilitate printing and (browser)
searching? (Humm, that would be a good item to add to the Ruby Cookbook
FAQ.)

Conrad


Rubies are Red
Just like Roses
Maybe Matz is
our new Moses.