Re: what's new in 8.0.1?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg117297] Re: what's new in 8.0.1?
- From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
- Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:00:22 -0500 (EST)
On 3/13/11 at 5:24 AM, mike.honeychurch at gmail.com (Armand Tamzarian) wrote: >On Mar 12, 9:08 pm, Bill Rowe <readn... at sbcglobal.net> wrote: >>On 3/11/11 at 4:35 AM, mike.honeychu... at gmail.com (Armand >>Tamzarian) wrote: >>>1. re: bug. Evaluating user documentation before a release ought >>>to be part of the pre-release screening. Bugs that show up when >>>evaluating user documentation are, by definition, bugs that are >>>readily detectable. Allowing these through creates perceptions of >>>carelessness and poor quality assurance. >>How easily an issue in user documentation is found clearly depends >>on the size of the documentation. For Mathematica version 4 (when >>the documentation was still be distributed as hard copy), the >>documentation was a 1470 page hard bound volume with an additional >>535 page soft cover volume. For Mathematica 8, if the documentation >>were printed, it would likely be 15-20 volumes of the size of the >>hard bound volume that came with version 4. It is unrealistic to >>expect that much documentation to be error free. Nor is it accurate >>to say errors in that much documentation are "readily detectable". >Couldn't disagree more. Evaluate notebook and then search for pink >boxes, search for error messages. Are you suggesting that couldn't >be done programmatically by the makers of the best software ever >invented. Apparently, we have different ideas as to what constitutes errors in the documentation. What you suggest above would only catch problems with the supplied examples. It would not find problems where the documentation indicated a different behavior that actually occurs. I agree for a suitably restricted set of errors, they should be readily detectable. But I definitely do not agree *all* errors in the documentation are readily detectable.