From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 12:44:56 -0400 From: Russ Cox To: Alberto Cortes , Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] first capital letter in function names at man pages, why? In-Reply-To: <20040520155317.GD2522@shire> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20040520145925.GA2276@shire> <7359f04904052008222b1ec778@mail.gmail.com> <20040520155317.GD2522@shire> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 810ba7be-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > I think the real way to help the reader is "to capitalize the letter at > the beginning of a sentence" and "to avoid beginning sentences with > function names". What really hit me is why some man pages do only > half the work. It's unnecessarily verbose to write "The function strdup does foo." instead of "Strdup does foo." everywhere. The real problem is the impedance mismatch between the relative case-insensitivity of English convention and the case-sensitivity of most Unix tools. It occurs when editing any English text (or text in most other western languages), not just man pages. Patching the man pages is a kludge. Russ