Oh, my bad. I missed the fact he cross posted. I even looked and made sure
I was replying to comp.lang.c++ before I gave a c++ answer. Yes, cross
posting is evil.
You know, it is interesting. "Everybody knows" that (i.e., the
conventional wisdom is that) cross-posting is better than multi-posting,
but I have often argued that that bit of CW 'taint so. For, among other
reasons, this one. Cross-posting assumes that answers are correct (or,
more precisely, that answers can be evaluated) regardless of which forum
they are posted in. A perfectly reasonable layman's position, to be
sure, but, as we see here, not good enough for us experts.
Whereas, if the newbie multi-posts (which is his natural inclination,
given that many [most?] of the commonly available newbie tools - i.e.,
Google and Microsoft - make proper cross-posting difficult), he could then
follow the responses independently in each forum and deal accordingly.
P.S. Specific example. Every once in a awhile, somebody will post some
sort of Unix-y/C-y question, cross-posting it to a dozen or so Unix-y/C-y
groups, including clc, and the clc pedants will do their usual:
Off topic. Not portable. Cant discuss it here. Blah, blah, blah.
routine, posting that bit of valuable information to, of course, all
dozen or so groups - after which the post degenerates into the usual clc
bickering about topicality, all the while being posted to all dozen or
so groups. This despite the fact that the post *was* topical in
probably all but one (or maybe two, if clc++ was included and the
participants there are as anal as the clc guys) of those groups.
And the point, of course, is that simple multi-posting would have
avoided this mess.