Xanaspeak

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

As I mentioned at the last weekly planning meeting, I have been 
working on a Xanaspeak Dictionary. The dictionary focuses on 
the terms used in the Highlights section of the weekly planning 
meeting. It is intended as a primer for  nontechnical people 
(or technical people whose jobs forbid them from working technically) 
at autodesk who might be interested in our status for one reason 
or another (chris record and I both occasionally send a piece 
of "us" mail to interested parties up there). 

This dictionary may be the least important document ever to come 
out of Xanadu. There is a far stronger emphasis on ease of reading 
than on technical accuracy. I give some of our technical terms 
 the same kind of treatment that 6th grade science books give 
atoms--i.e., we all know that atoms are not made of little billiard 
balls, but that's what the books say. 

Even some kinds of blatant errors are not important here, considering 
the size and type of the audience for this dictionary. The really 
important dictionaries are those which we will distribute widely, 
to be used by technical people, that will be built by our third 
party support people in conjunction with everyone here. I urge 
everyone to resist the temptation to perfect this document, and 
to instead work toward shipping the product one day earlier.

Having done my best to put the significance of this document 
in its proper perspective, if you would like to read it, you 
can get it in Word format from my Tops folder "current work". 
Or come to my office, and I'll give you one of the 3 paper copies. 
If you make changes to the electronic version, I should be able 
to find the changes using Docucomp, and merge the changes from 
there (though, as an aside, there isn't anything in Docucomp 
that we want to adopt for our frontend--Xanadu will work a lot 
better. At best, it will be no more difficult to merge changes 
from Docucomp than from redlined paper).


--marcs