Re: Why was 'const' implemented in Lua 5.4?

[Gerhard Sittig <gerhard.sittig@...>]

On Mon, 2022-05-30 at 14:59 -0500, Benjamin Riggs wrote:
>
> In the days before gmail, email programs didn't collect email
> threads into one single view, but showed them all separately.

Uhm, what? gmail existed 25 years ago? When traditional readers
used to provide conversations in threads, before the "intuitive"
readers even noticed that such an option exists? Was not aware.

> Posting at the bottom of the email helped with knowing which
> email was being replied to and what came before it. Despite
> every modern email client auto-generating a thread view, some
> people still use antiquated email clients for reasons of
> ideology and don't have their emails conveniently grouped into
> threads.

Nope. Some people prefer proven and fully functional mail clients
_because_ of their feature set and usability, not "despite" their
"not being modern". A lot of modern readers are terrible, and not
up to the task. Convenient perhaps, but not suitable for serious
work with email. Your milage may vary, but those who use "old"
MUAs do it not for religious reasons but instead because this
software works, and does so properly, while modern software often
doesn't, and only appears to while it actually doesn't.

Quoting the _relevant_ part of what's being replied to also helps
seeing what the reply refers to. Full-quotes are bad style, too,
by the way. Try to find out what a message is about when a single
short sentence (maybe "yes" or so) is followed by a full copy of
a lengthy thread of many paragraphs that offers a lot of options
what might have been replied to ...

There's more on this subject in http://learn.to/edit_messages
(haven't checked how up-to-date this is, used to be one of the
popular resources in the past). Maybe the next short text helps
illustrate the issue, if it doesn't then I don't know what would.

  A: It makes it hard to follow a conversation.
  Q: What's so bad about it?
  A: Answer on top, full quote below.
  Q: What's the most annoying thing about email?


virtually yours
Gerhard Sittig
--
     If you don't understand or are scared by any of the above
             ask your parents or an adult to help you.