Re: Tense, mostly

Jonathan Robie (jwrobie@mindspring.com)
Thu, 12 Dec 1996 16:57:02 -0500

>Don Wilkins writes:
>
>"The extra twist she [Mari, me] adds is to do away with traditional temporal
>limits on the tense in the indicative, and as a fellow programmer of
>sorts I can appreciate the appeal this has in seeming to provide a
>more consistent way to deal with problem passages."

Hi, Don,

You've just stepped right into two of my pet peeves simultaneously. The goal
of a scientific explanation isn't to deal with problem passages, but to deal
with all of the data, including the problem passages.

The same holds for programming, incidentally, you want to have a design that
encompasses the entire problem, not an inadequate design with lots of
patches here and there to handle special cases.

Jonathan

P.S., Mari has already replied to your statement about "doing away with
traditional temporal limits on the tense in the indicative"...

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