Subject: bug#10302: Some typos in web.texi documenation

From: jc zulian <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:08:25 +0100

Hello,

Allow me to share with you some ideas about this topic.

To me the 'iff' was a typo at first sight for many reasons:
   - it looks like the regular type of typo one would do, pressing twice
the same letter by leaving the finger too long on a key
   - the word doesn't exist in every dictionaries. I didn't find it in my
English dictionary (regular one on paper) but I did however find it in
wikipedia and on online dictionaries.
   - as a non-native-english speaker I never came across it before
(although I read a lot in english, both technical and non-technical texts)

Although it is "defined" in guile documentation in the typographical
convention I wouldn't have had the idea to look there because it doesn't
look like a typographical symbol. Usually those symbols are really looking
like "real symbol", understand graphical symbol (ie any kind of arrows, or
icons). Maybe it could be possible then to use one of the mathematical
symbols used to represent iff. Then for sure it cannot be taken for a typo.

Also I have the feeling that in the typographical convention of guile's
documentation the meaning of iff is somewhat redefined. In there the
meaning is "returns val if condition is true and #f otherwise" (if I
understood correctly). But after having a quick read at the wikipedia page
of iff I feel that the definitions are not exatly the same. But I might be
wrong here, I never study mathematic to a high level and never approach the
logic branch of it.

Maybe another option could be to add a reference link where iff is used
bringing readers to the typographical convention.

Or it could be possible, as you already suggested, to use a more commonly
used 'if' and build a longer sentence around it (eg if x then y otherwise
z).

These are my inputs on the topic, but I can't tell what would be best thing
to do. But for sure I have learn something and won't get confused anymore.

Regards,
Jean-christophe

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Andy Wingo <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Thanks for the follow-up, Mark.
>
> On Thu 15 Dec 2011 05:27, Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> > jc zulian <[email-masked]> writes:
> >> While reading the documentation I came across some typos. Please find
> >> attached a patch to correct those (I hope the patch format is
> >> alright).
> >
> > Actually those are not typos.  In mathematics, "iff" is widely
> > understand to mean "if and only if".
> >
> > I guess this brings up a good point though: We should not assume that
> > readers of the Guile manual are familiar with this terminology.
>
> Indeed, the intro notes this:
>
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Typographical-Conventions.html
>
> > I'm leaving this bug open as a reminder that occurrences of "iff" should
> > probably be changed to something else.
>
> I wonder, it might be the right thing just to change them all to "if".
> WDYT?
>
> Andy
> --
> http://wingolog.org/
>