fur a little humor: code is law (the materialists cybertarians!)
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John Noble
> This is what happens when you reply above. I have always favored reply
> below, but I'm bucking enough lately without taking on the above/below
> controversy, which could send this list into anguished paroxysms over
> whether it is better to assume or assure that everyone remembers what
> everyone is talking about.
http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/dict/b.html#bigend
Big-Endian / Little-Endian
two factions within Lilliputian society: Big-Endians break their eggs at the larger end ("the primitive way"), while the Emperor commanded all his subjects to break the smaller end. Resistance by traditionalists and their subsequent suppression by the government had resulted in civil unrest. The Big-Endian faction had the support of neighboring Blefuscu, a further source of friction between the traditional enemies. Thus Swift satirizes the suppression of Catholics that had racked England and subject nations from the reign of Henry VIII to Swift's own time.
the Emperor ... published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects,
upon great Penaltys, to break the smaller End of their Eggs. The
People so highly resented this Law, that our Historys tell us there
have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor
lost his Life, and another his Crown. (I:4;4)
The assumptions of bottom-posting are that a) People generally remember the topic, but that b) Exact context is useful. I'm coming to wonder whether either of these assumptions in fact holds true.
However, I've noticed that empirically, top-posting seems to encourage people to just add a few lines and send the entire previous message again. This is rather bad in a thread, giving something like message(n) = message(n-1) + small comments + list-sig , hence message(n) = sigma {(i=1..n), contents(i)} + n * list-sig
This can happen with bottom-posting, but as more and more paging has to be done to get to the bottom, it tends to dawn on people that they can trim off the prior content. Top-posting does not give this effect. And here we return to code-is-law, since whether a posting program encourages top or bottom posting can have a measurable effect on the structure of a list, simply by promoting one or the other.
-- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer sethf at sethf.com http://sethf.com
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