Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)

[Anders Wirzenius <anders@no.email.thanks.invalid>]

Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt> writes:

> > Anyone else than I missing the good old days with printouts from
> > line printers with continuous paper?
> 
> This interests me, because I'm researching knowledge media, how the
> medium constraints influence habits and effectivness of reading, what
> levels of knowledge organization are influenced by technology... You
> mean the "page principle" (fit a function inside a page or less) is
> totally technology-driven (and hence not a principle)? Not a rough
> measure of some cognitive absolute? Thanks.

I mean the easiness to "turn pages" using a finger under the left
edge of the paper strip. My English is not good enough to explain
that more detailed. I think everyone who have experienced the
line printer paper strips knows what I mean. 
Back in the "good old days" I worked on a system with hundreds of 
code (Fortran subroutine) files up to some thousand lines.
We kept all code as a library of printed paper strips and it was 
very fast to go to the files and find whatever information you 
might have needed from the code. That even if we had the excellent
editor (don't remember the name anymore) on our VAX machines.

Perhaps you may obtain something similar using a text editor 
with bookmarks, but I have never reached that level of usage.

I have compared the screen_scrolling versus flip_through_paper to
a situation where you read your newspaper (at least A3 size) 
looking at the text through a frame of size A5 (or smaller).
You are not allowed to move your eyes outside the frame.
If you don't want to jump to another place in the text by 
moving the frame and your eyes simultaneously,
jumping to a new place is done in three steps:
First step one or two steps back (scroll out), 
then move your frame to a new place (move cursor), 
and then step back closer (scroll in). 
After which you may continue to read (through the frame, of course).

Yes, I think it is technology driven.  
Why are printed newspapers still popular even if a lot of 
people have a permanent, uninterrupted Internet connection 
and are able to rapidly move even between several 
electronic newspapers?

I remember having read somewhere that 2 or 3 centuries back
many writing desks had an inclination which made the
reader look at the text perpendicular to the paper.
Later the desks have been tilted so that we read the text 
from an angle less than 90 degrees. And feel obviously
more comfortable with it.
Now our computer screens are tilted to the 90 degrees. :)

Anders