Re: Anton's amendment
Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
> no, code in a program could never be a secondary section. it is
> inherently the "primary topic" of the work - which automatically
> excludes it from being secondary.
It seems to me that this cannot quite be right, at least, not in the
way craig intends it.
If we say that the code (*all* the code, no matter what it does) is
the primary topic of a program, then surely it should follow that the
text (*all* the text, no matter what it says) is the primary text of a
document.
In other words, the primary/secondary distinction is designed to
distinguish on the basis of topic within a document, and works with a
background notion of the purpose or primary intention of a document.
So the emacs manual has a purpose and primary intention of documenting
the behavior and use of the emacs program; the GNU Manifesto bundled
with it has a very different purpose and intention, and this is part
of what is meant when it is called secondary.
Similarly, the code that prints the GNU Project message when you start
emacs up ("For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type
C-h C-p.") is not part of the purpose or primary intention of emacs.
It has a different purpose and intention: to advertise the GNU Project
to the users of emacs.
Now, someone might say that this snippet of code in Emacs is
functional, and since it is the nature of a program to be functional,
it follows that everything functional *is* by definition, primary,
then we are no longer using primary to refer to purposes and
intentions. And it is then perfectly fair to point out that it is the
nature of a document to communicate, and say that everything
communicative is, by definition, primary with in it.
That is, what is the notion of "primary" being used here? If it is
with reference to the intentions and purposes of the creator, then it
seems to me that both programs and documents can have secondary
material. If it instead refers to what the thing actually is in
itself, with reference to the nature of the kind of work in question
(documentation, which communicates, or programs, which function), then
both programs and documents are all inherently primary.
Thomas
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