Re: Lisp Garbage Collection

George Neuner wrote:
On 4 Sep 2006 03:00:34 -0700, "Rob Thorpe"
<robert.thorpe@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

llothar wrote:
George Neuner wrote:
.... a lot interesting stuff ....

Do have some API calls for the userland dirty page access so that i can
find my way through the MSDN ?

I think you have unconciously hit the nail on the head. No-one person
really understands Windows and the various Unix flavours treatment of
this well enough to be able to make a sound judgement. All the
information is hidden in the back of the MSDN or obscure man pages and
has never really been brought together.

At least MSDN provides 99.44% of the information the application
programmer needs, cross indexed, hyperlinked, and with examples.
Though you still need to look in the component development kits for
some of the esoteric stuff, it's safe to assume anything not in MSDN
is for mature audiences only.

MSDN is very through, though slow to use if you use it from the MS site
and extremely large if you install it on your own machine.

In contrast, the man pages on many Unix and Unix-like systems are hit
and miss. Frequently you look up some lesser used function and find
just a sentence about its use and a listing of its flags and error
codes with no explanations of what they mean. Or better yet, you find
some data structure required to use the function only partially
documented (and that in a different page).

Yes, unfortunately.

The real Unixes are, IME, uniformly better than the free ones WRT man
page quality (AT&T and Solaris stand out in my recollection), but even
in the best of them you can find numerous omissions if you look.

In "Linux" system the GNU Info pages, and their HTML mirrors, are the
best documentation of the Gnu parts of the system, and they are much
more informative than man pages are anywhere. But that's only one part
of the distribution, not as large a part as once it was.

The rest is hit and miss, many of the small single person stuff has OK
documentation. KDE and GNOME have some good documentation, but with
holes. X's documentation is OK if not quite up to date.

The Kernel and the utilities around it have the most irritating docs in
my view. They're often incomplete and out of date. Often the
documentation is considered to be the code, which is a poor situation.

In fairness, MSDN was intended to *be* the main source of Windows
documentation whereas Unix's man pages were intended to be only a
quick reference. The problem is that nowadays the in-depth
documentation is either missing entirely (BSD/Linux) or, in many
cases, provided in a flat electronic form that can't easily be
searched.

Yes.

.

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