nathanw@MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams) writes:
> PS. I have never seen an example of sectional page "numbering" as bad
> as the AARM. "(II-B)3-5"? Who dreams this stuff up?

So, personally I hate it too.  But if you angle your head the right
way, it's not quite as weird as it might seem.  I recently had an
experience with a MIPS core vendor which is populated largely by
ex-digital semiconductor folks (no, not that one, the other one 8-),
and it became obvious how one could end up with this convention in a
semi-sane way.

Consider a book composed of chapters, each of which is put into a
separate document and numbered separately.  set up the page numbers to
be something like "S-#" i.e. section indicator then number in that
section.

I don't get how you can do cross-referencing sanely with that model,
though, and it can have hilarious consequences for preliminary
documents.  (we recently got such a preliminary spec, but they'd not
filled in the section indicators, and there weren't more than, say, 3
pages in any of the chapters in the document.  my boss would ask me
where things were in the document, and could with high probability of
success answer "on page 1!" for any question he might ask...  8-)



still hate it, but now i think i may be at least coming to understand
it.  8-)


cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.