[erlang-questions] ML shaped language for the Erlang VM

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 29/06/16 10:31 PM, Anthony Ramine wrote:
> I'm sorry for the documentation pain you encountered by not having the 
> documentation for the cerl module.
>
> Unfortunately the OTP team decided it was more important to not have 
> utilitarian modules listed first in the documentation, rather than 
> having documentation at all.
>
> https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/363#issuecomment-99829062
Thank you for that link, which puzzles me mightily.

It seems to me obvious that there are three intrinsically
unrelated things:
  - exposition order: the order in which a beginner needs to read
    a series of documents
  - reference frequency order: the order which puts the most
    often needed documents at the top and the least often needed
    documents at the bottom
  - alphabetic order: the dictionary order of the names of things.

Anyone else remember the two-dimensional table of contents for
"An Informal Introduction to Algol 68"?  How about the textbooks
with a reading-order digraph at the beginning?

Of these three orders (not that these are the only three) the *least*
important one is alphabetic order.  You cannot use it unless you already
know the name of the thing you are looking for.