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Jack Klein <> wrote:

Hi,

Sorry for my act. But what is toppost?
It seems there are more rules I have to follow in order to post in this
news group.

David

> On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 01:38:50 +0000 (UTC), cyberdude
> <> wrote in comp.lang.c:

> Please don't top post. New material you add belongs _after_ quoted
> material you are replying to. I reformatted this post and added my
> answer after your question, where it belongs.

>> Martien Verbruggen <> wrote:
>>
>> > CHAR_BIT.
>>
>> > It's a constant defined in limits.h, giving you the number of bits in
>> > a byte (char) for your implementation.
>>
>> > That same limits.h also defines all the upper and lower limits on your
>> > integer types (CHAR_MIN and CHAR_MAX, INT_MIN, INT_MAX, LLONG_MIN,
>> > LLONG_MAX, and many others), as well as the various parameters that
>> > define precision and range of the floating point types.
>>
>> > Martien
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Thanks for telling me about CHAR_BIT. But it seems I needn't to put
>> limits.h in my C programs. Actually, where can I find this file? Thank
>> you in advance.
>>
>> David

> limits.h should be in the same place all other the headers that came
> with your compiler live, like stdio.h and string.h. It is a standard
> C header and every comforting compiler since at least 1989 provides
> it.

> --
> Jack Klein
> Home: http://JK-Technology.Com
> FAQs for
> comp.lang.c http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
> comp.lang.c++ http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
> alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ ftp://snurse-l.org/pub/acllc-c++/faq

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 12:30:52 +0000 (UTC), cyberdude
<> wrote:

This is top posting (posting replies BEFORE the message
to which you are replying).

Now scroll down to the end of the message.

> Jack Klein <> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Sorry for my act. But what is toppost?
> It seems there are more rules I have to follow in order to post in this
> news group.
>
> David
>
>> On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 01:38:50 +0000 (UTC), cyberdude
>> <> wrote in comp.lang.c:
>
>> Please don't top post. New material you add belongs _after_ quoted
>> material you are replying to. I reformatted this post and added my
>> answer after your question, where it belongs.
>
>>> Martien Verbruggen <> wrote:
>>>
>>> > CHAR_BIT.
>>>
>>> > It's a constant defined in limits.h, giving you the number of bits in
>>> > a byte (char) for your implementation.
>>>
>>> > That same limits.h also defines all the upper and lower limits on
>>> your
>>> > integer types (CHAR_MIN and CHAR_MAX, INT_MIN, INT_MAX, LLONG_MIN,
>>> > LLONG_MAX, and many others), as well as the various parameters that
>>> > define precision and range of the floating point types.
>>>
>>> > Martien
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Thanks for telling me about CHAR_BIT. But it seems I needn't to put
>>> limits.h in my C programs. Actually, where can I find this file?
>>> Thank
>>> you in advance.
>>>
>>> David
>
>> limits.h should be in the same place all other the headers that came
>> with your compiler live, like stdio.h and string.h. It is a standard
>> C header and every comforting compiler since at least 1989 provides
>> it.
>
>> -- Jack Klein
>> Home: http://JK-Technology.Com
>> FAQs for
>> comp.lang.c http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
>> comp.lang.c++ http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
>> alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ ftp://snurse-l.org/pub/acllc-c++/faq
>

This is where people in comp.lang.c (and the rest of Usenet, pretty
much) like to see responses.

cyberdude <> writes:
> Sorry for my act. But what is toppost?
> It seems there are more rules I have to follow in order to post in this
> news group.

Allow me to demonstrate.

========================================
A: No.

> Q: Should my response precede what I'm responding to?
========================================

The convention in this newsgroup, and in most others, is to write your
responses *after* the quoted material to which you're responding.
It's also unnecessary to quote the entire article to which you're
responding; just provide enough context for your answer to make sense.
Remember that most of your readers have already read the previous
article; they don't need to see the whole thing again. This
convention allows readers to read each article from beginning to end,
without having to go back and forth to pick up any relevant context.

There's a competing convention in which the entire previous article is
quoted, including all the previous responses which it quoted, with the
new material at the top. This leads to huge articles consisting
mostly of lines starting with "> > > > > > "; these lines are either
too long for most readers' displays, or are broken arbitrarily to make
them fit. Each article is a then copy of the entire thread, with
earlier part of reformatted to make them more difficult to read.
Putting the new material at the top does make it easier to see, but
only because the bulk of the article consists of wasteful junk which
most readers will ignore anyway.

In my opinion, the only thing worse than this convention is a mixture
of the two. That's why a lot of us will rearrange top-posted articles
when we respond to them.

Unfortunately, a lot of news and e-mail software makes this latter
convention easier to use; it automatically quotes the entire previous
article and leaves the cursor (insertion point) at the beginning of
the quoted material. It takes a little extra effort to trim the
quoted material and place your responses after it, but you only have
to do it once, and it benefits the hundreds or thousands of people who
are going to read your article. Most of us here take the time to do
this for your benefit (and each other's).

We tend to be pickier here than than the denizens of most other
newsgroups because this is a very high-volume technical group that's
in constant danger of being overwhelmed by inappropriate material.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*> <http://www.sdsc.edu/~kst>
Schroedinger does Shakespeare: "To be *and* not to be"