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I don't understand how you don't understand the order of magnitude difference in flexibility, utility, availability, etc between needing to run a specific executable vs merely opening a text file in any way.

"you always have the exe" is just not even remotely a valid argument.




> "you always have the exe" is just not even remotely a valid argument.

Why? Can you explain it to me?

I'm a Rust developer. I use my work station every day for 8 hours to write code. I also use `cargo doc` (the tool for which "I always have the exe") every day to look up API docs, and in total this saves me a ton of time every month (probably multiple hours at least, if I'm working with unfamiliar libraries), and I save even more time because I don't have to maintain separate header files (because Rust doesn't have them).

Can you explain the superior flexibility and utility of "merely opening a text file" over this approach, and how that would make me (and my colleagues at work) more productive and save me time?

I'm not being sarcastic here; genuinely, please convince me that I'm wrong. I've been a C developer for over 20 years and I did it the "opening a text file" way and never want to go back, but maybe you're seeing something here that I never saw myself, in which case please enlighten me.


It's less available in rare situations.

It's not less flexible once you already took availability into account.

It has more utility, that's the entire point.


I don’t understand how you don’t understand that that’s always an option. Rust source files are written in plaintext too.

There are a few people in this thread, including you, who claim that they vastly prefer the output of documentation to be plain text in a single file rather than linked HTML files OR reading the source in multiple plaintext files.

That’s a preference, so y’all can’t be wrong. But consider that if this preference was even slightly popular, cargo doc would probably get a —-text option that output everything in a single text file. The fact that it doesn’t have it tells me that this preference is very niche.




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