On 05/24/2012 04:13 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:47 PM, KC wrote:

...

exponentiation and logarithm. So, I believe this C++ versus Haskell versus (your language of choice) is a Penn & Teller misdirection. Whereas, another level of indirection solves everything.

Is it me or is this style of message — content broken between subject and body, no reference information tying it to the presumed topic (or possibly a /non sequitur/) — better suited to Twitter than a mailing list?

This has come up before -- this KC person probably has a broken mail client which doesn't set appropriate References headers. @KC: Which mail client are you using? ... and could you please 1) (ideally) use a mail client which doesn't screw up threading, or 2) (less ideally) avoid messing with the subject line so that at least everybody else's mail client has that to go on for threading purposes? Regards,

On 05/24/2012 04:31 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:

...

This has come up before -- this KC person probably has a broken mail client which doesn't set appropriate References headers.

That, however, ignores the rest of it; the lack of references in this case forms a pattern with the other things I noted, in that a conversation is apparently being held in the form of single observations emitted at the point of observation instead of being collected and presented *as* a conversation.

Right. I was actually just about to respond to (only) KC in person, but perhaps unwisely, decided to "hijack" your response to add a little explanation for everyone. You are of course right that not quoting context and just randomly spewing out small bits of text is not really suitable for a mailing list.

On 05/24/2012 05:24 AM, Tom Murphy wrote:

Just to play devil's advocate, if you look back at the list, KC has written a lot of helpful and informative messages in the past.

I don't think anyone's disputing that, it's just that the form of many of his/her messages + lack of threading means that they'll get ignored (because they don't make sense without context... which is unavailable) or that KC will get killfiled (after seeing enough "meaningless" messages from a person this tends to happen). Which would be a shame. Regards,