As I probably already mentioned somewhere else previously our common goal should be to yield a good result as a result of a discussion. Often there are good reasons to reject first suggestions. When there is some objective criteria it's easy to give a reason. When there is only some subjective criteria usually the majority of users (taking part in the discussion) decides. The discussion should help to continously improve the suggestion so that it can be accepted finally. Suggestions from dkl (as you mentioned him) typically were well-founded from the beginning so there was not a lot of discussion necessary. This is typically not the case for suggestions from beginners.
speedfixer wrote:I did not have a problem with the prevoius page entry. Someone else did. I can see the source of sancho3's concern. The essence of the suggested correction made by sancho3 was not served.
It was not served _yet_ - he wrote that the he'll think about a suitable formulation. I'm also not quite sure whether we were really discussing about the essence of sancho3's correction in the recent posts. I can't tell what sancho3 meant (and also don't really want to speculate about it), but I think an actual improvement would be achieved by describing the "pre-processing" step: what's done there and what the result is/looks like.
speedfixer wrote:WHY must you sidestep a request to make things simple for a beginner?
While it may be true that more than one file could result from a single command line, the objective of the option is clear:
from any single <source>.bas source, generate a SINGLE <source>.pp.bas resultant file that contains any referenced files, with macro expansion
IMHO your suggestion doesn't make it simpler. Neither do I think that the generation of a _single_ output file is an important fact to stress explicitly. And just because you aren't passing multiple files to fbc it doesn't mean that others won't - and the documentation is for everybody, so the general case should be described. IMHO your suggested change makes the description less accurate.
I'll just mention again what I suggested in my first post in this thread: my suggestion would be to describe the "pre-processing" step. Explain that it does expand macros and that it inlines the #inlcude-d files recursively (among others). That would keep that output files description intact (a <source>.pp.bas for each input <source>.bas) and describe the content of the output in more detail (for users who don't know what pre-processing in terms of a compiler means).
It just needs somebody who formulates a few sentences explaining that so that it could be added to the wiki. :-)
