New MACSYMA for Genera 7.2

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Tue, 6 Sep 88 10:59 PDT
    From: Seddigh@vermithrax.sch.symbolics.com (Reza Seddigh)

	Date: Fri, 2 Sep 88 17:56 EDT
	From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	    Date: Fri, 2 Sep 88 13:27 PDT
	    From: Seddigh@vermithrax.sch.symbolics.com,
		    slug-liaison@vermithrax.sch.symbolics.com

	    This news hot off the press from the MACSYMA group at Symbolics:

	If it's so up-to-date, how come it repeatedly refers to September, 1988
	in the future tense?

							barmar

    Because it is an anouncement of pending events in the near future. The
    1anouncement0 is hot off the press, the event to which it refers will
    happen in September (a very up-to-date and in-vougue month these days) :-)

I'm sorry for the nasty tone of my previous message.  However, the press
release was written like the kind of release one usually sees several
months in advance of the actual release of a product.  For instance, it
contained disclaimers about features described that might be left out of
the product.  Since it was describing a product that is supposed to be
released within at most four weeks, I generally expect that the content
of the release should be pretty well known by then.  In fact, by the
time this announcement was released, I would expect the product to be in
QA and the manuals to be at the printer.  Perhaps the disclaimers are
simply a contingency to deal with last-minute emergency changes, so if I
read too much into them I apologize.

As far as the future tense is concerned, I would have felt much more
comfortable had it said "later this month" or "by the end of September"
wherever (or at least the first time) it said "in September".  Maybe
regular businessmen know that in press releases a time frame always
means the end of that period, but I'm a computer programmer and I read
things literally; when something claims to be available in September, I
assume that it means any time in September.  By September 2 you should
know whether you are going to be releasing something in early or late
September, so there should be no reason to be vague.  Also, I assumed we
were getting a head start on the rest of the media, so it seemed likely
that this announcement wouldn't actually get into the print media until
the middle of the month, when the language would have seemed much more
incongruous.

Finally, none of my flaming is intended to be directed at Mr. Seddigh,
unless he is involved in the wording of press releases.  I very much
appreciate his posting of press releases to us.  It was the text of the
release that bothered me.

                                                barmar
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