a stumper

[Cheng Derek <CDerek -at- GATE-HAL -dot- PSD -dot- SYMBOL -dot- COM>]

Alright, here's a stumper for y'all.

In the process of reducing unnecessary words but working in active voice,
I've run into an interesting dilemna (sp?).

Let's say we're working in a unix environment where character case is
essential and we are describing an element of unix. A sentence might
read:

usadr contains the terminal user address. usadr is 16-characters long.

The sentence would begin with a lower case letter. Strange yet inherently
beautiful.

I could re-write it to read:

The usadr field contains the user address for each terminal. The usadr
field is 16-characters long.

But a programmer who is familiar with usadr does not need to know that it
is a field name.

Talk amongst yourselves...

ps. the examples given are strictly examples and have no real informative
value. in fact, i suggest just thinking about the model rather than the
specific example. i was hard-pressed for a real one.

-derek

   ~   ^  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
   @   @    "The courtroom is a crucible. It it, we burn away at
     ^       irrelevancies until we are left with one thing:
 ( \___/ )    the truth, for all time."
                                         - Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
                                             cderek -at- psd -dot- symbol -dot- com