How dare you!

[Tom Neff]

question -
>I have just turned on this echo and am wondering if there are many 
>MicroSoft C v5.1 programmers out there.          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
												  note question

someone responded -
>BTW, this is the wrong place to ask. Try comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer when
>it is created in a few days...

now the followup -
>I too have noticed a certain snobbishness in many newsgroups about things
>like this.  

Sometimes it can seem like snobbishness, sometimes it can even BE snobbish,
everyone's human -- but the basic idea is correct.  The underlying goal
is to put things where they belong and prevent chaos here.

>Microsoft's is a perfectly valid compiler.  My Xenix 2.3.3 runs
>a version of 5.1 with a DOS cross-development system.  

So it is, and so you do, but this newsgroup is not for discussing the
individual quirks of specific implementations.  It's for discussing the
language as a whole.  Precisely to the extent that MSC is a full and valid
C environment (which I agree it is), the concept of 'MSC programmer'
becomes irrelevant here.  'MSC programming' questions mean things like
how to detect keypress or play with stack size or link with MASM, which
are not C language issues.

>I would have been interested in an answer.  

But how exactly would the question "are there many MSC 5.1 programmers
here" have been answered in a way visible to you and others?  6,000
individual followup "Yes me too" articles?  That's what we try to
avoid.

At best, one might post something like "If you program MSC 5.1, please
reply to this article via email" which would be legitimate, but third
parties wouldn't see the answer.

There should indeed be sub-groups created to handle specific
implementations like MSC.  Comp.lang.c ain't it.