Re: a stumper

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- TI -dot- COM -dot- >]

Cheng Derek said:
|}
|} Let's say we're working in a unix environment where character case is
|} essential and we are describing an element of unix.

O.K. 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 run into this all the time, and without fail, I recast the sentence so
that the sentence begins with a capital letter. Why? Because there is a
lot of stray punctuation flying around in my stuff (the .bss directive,
for example) so many times the capital letter is the only reliable
indication that you have for the beginning of a sentence. Thus:

The 16-character usadr field contains the user address for the terminal.

On the other hand, if this is the point in the book where I am describing
the thing, it is more likely to look like this:

Field:          usadr
Length:         16 characters
Description:    Contains the user address for the terminal.

Cheers,
    _______________   _____
   /  ___  __/__\  \ /  / _\    Steve Fouts
  /___ \|  |  ___\  |  /  __\   sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
 /   /  \  |      \   /      \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper,
but _minds_ alive on the shelves."      -- Gilbert Highet