FreeLists / oracle-l / Oracle rabbit colonies

[J Buchanan <oracle@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been reading through the Oracle PL/SQL Users Guide and Reference  
from various years and noticed that the 11g documentation seems to be   
"lightening up" a little.  The jovial and personal tone found in the  
earlier documentation pretty much dried up and went away with 10g.   
This is unfortunate as the occasional side-step explanations made  
reading the older manuals a more interesting.
I do not have access to any documentation prior to 8.0 so I cannot  
compare the documentation of those releases, however the PL/SQL Users  
Guide and Reference for versions 8.0 through 9iR2 make mention (in a  
mere 12 words) of the Fibonacci sequence and how it was used to model  
the growth of a rabbit colony.  The reference to Fibonacci was made  
within the "Understanding and Using Recursion" section of the  
manuals.  The 8.0 through 9.x have a few code examples that are  
interesting reads.  But 10gR1 and 10gR2 documentation not only omitted  
the "rabbit colony" reference but also the code examples in that  
section. The 10g documentation as a whole is rather dry and unexciting  
and the examples I thought to be useful were ripped out.  The 11gR1  
documentation managed to squeeze in a recursive function for finding  
the nth term of a Fibonacci series as a means to demonstrate using  
RESULT_CACHE.  The example procedure "find_staff" disappeared  
altogether with the 10g documentation.  I doubt the cuts were made to  
conserve space given that the PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference is  
5000+ pages long.
Scanning through the other books through other releases follows the  
same pattern...  Oracle must have hired a new manager to preside over  
the doc writers for 10g ;-)

jason b.
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