On 17-jun-2006, at 16:59, Eliot Lear wrote:
I do think that ASCII art has its limits, particularly when it
comes to
mathematics.
I'm pretty sure I read as many RFCs as the next IETF participant
(well, the ones that don't have a three or four letter acronym
starting with "I" in their job description, anyway) and the only
formula I seem to remember is this one:
log(number of allocated objects)
HD = ------------------------------------------
log(maximum number of allocatable objects)
In other words: is this really a significant issue in practice?
It's much better to use the way this is expressed in well-known
programming languages anyway, like:
hd = log(numberofallocatedobjects) / log
(maximumnumberofallocatableobjects)
This also gets around the limitation that exists in math and perl
where you're lost if you don't know the meaning of a certain symbol
because you can't easily look up unknown symbols like you can with
unknown words.
An interesting side-issue is that if RFCs are no longer plain ASCII,
it gets a lot more difficult to discuss them in email.
But I think a more gradual evolution is called for in this
case, with more consideration given to not only the normative issue
but
all the others Joel raised.
Looks to me that we don't even agree on what the problem is yet.
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