Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mstan!amull From: amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Permuted indices Summary: That reminds me... Message-ID: <1240@s8.Morgan.COM> Date: 17 Jul 90 15:26:53 GMT References: <1990Jul08.224741.1366@virtech.uucp> <1990Jul16.045730.10521@pcrat.uucp> Distribution: comp Organization: Morgan Stanley & Co. NY, NY Lines: 59 In article <1990Jul16.045730.10521@pcrat.uucp>, rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson) writes: > I have both the ISC version of the OSF/Motif Programmer's Reference > Manual (softcover) and the OSF version (hardcover). The ISC version > has a permuted index of 18 pages, and the OSF version has a traditional > index of 11 pages (smaller paper, too). Some people would find that factor of 1.6 significant. Think of it as that many more times that you find your references start on one page and end on the next. This is convenience? As a quick test, I just flipped open my OSF/MOTIF _Programmer's Guide_ and found 33 pages of reasonably set normal index. Does the ISC version have a 54 page vacation in Bermuda? Now I don't have the ISC version, so I'm guessing, but if I look up 'No explicit programmatic access' on page Index-16, I can find the rest of the story 'programmatic access...' on the facing page Index-17. I would guess that there's a lot of 'pixmap' stuff intervening in the ISC version, including a page fault. > ...Other than that, the documents > appear to be more or less identical. If you don't intimately know what > each Motif function does, the OSF index won't help, since most of the > entries are just the function names. At least in the ISC version, > I can look up "search" and see that there's a function > XmFileSelectionDoSearch(3X). But this can be a false alarm; Bermuda indices tend to generate more of them than normal indices. The existence of more references to chase is not helpful unless there is more information in them. In my experience the Bermuda index just repeats a lot of information with no great benefit. I can reveal that the worst index I know of is not strictly speaking a Bermuda index. The prize goes to the IMSL User's Manuals for their utterly vexacious 'KWIC' (Key Word In Camouflage) index. IMSL are the real avant-garde of indices, providing no less than three unusual indices at the back of the IMSL User's Manuals. First, the KWIC index, then the 'GAMS' - (Gee - Another Mind Stretcher) index, and the almost usable Alphabetical Index of Routines. The KWIC index is a version of Bermuda index, and it's the most annoying. The GAMS index is a non-starter, so you don't lose much time with it - you ignore it completely. On the rare occasions where you can guess the actual name of the routine you need (lest we forget, IMSL routines are sort of named by convention, e.g. 'DZPORC' is the name of the routine which uses the Jenkins-Traub three-stage algorithm...) you will find nirvana in the Alphabetical Index of Routines. Now some people like nouveau indices, but I find in books which provide them I usually skip the indices unless I can't find what I want by skimming the book. In fact a great deal of the time I find what I want in books this way. Usually I resort to an index to determine that something I'm searching for is _not_ present in the book. The more places a reference could appear in an index, the less pleasant this task is. Now unless you like barking up the wrong tree, I can't see why a Bermuda, (or even worse) indexing scheme is to be preferred. Later, Andrew Mullhaupt