"Pearl Harbor" still sucks...

On Fri, 28 Apr 2006 18:26:33 -0500, Jim Macklin wrote:

RPN

I think - given that you're not altering sentence structure, which is
what I believe would be required to shift operators and operands around
- what you mean is that you prefer to see your stacks as true PDLs
(emphasis on the D part). For some written language with which I'm not
familiar, this may be reasonable.

For the few I know (which, to some degree, includes English), it does not.

English is read in an order which includes top-to-bottom. It makes sense,
therefore, to represent chronology the same way. Top-posting forces one
to stray from this convention: Reading some at the top, skipping to the
bottom to read the question, and going back to the top to continue.

That's why you don't see FAQs listed as:

A
Q

A
Q

...

[Well...excluding certain game shows grin.] In normal conversations,
one does not answer to something that has not yet been said.

Bottom-posting comes best into play when one is directing
responses to specific points of the message to which the reply is being
authored. In a sequence of:

Old text
new text
Old text
new text

it is again reasonable - because we're already used to a top-to-bottom
reading order - for the new text to be in response to the old text above.

There's a funny example of how this fails in top-posting at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting

However, there's a constant theme through all these points: that the
author cares about the reader, reducing the costs associated with reading,
understanding, and replying to a message. For authors with no concern for
readers, none of this logic would be applicable. However, those same
authors could achieve the same effect by pounding randomly on their
keyboards.

- Andrew