Well-edited material (was: Python In A Nutshell)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <98e8vi22sqq at news1.newsguy.com>,
Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
>"Grant Edwards" <grante at visi.com> wrote in message
>news:slrn9aj98s.ock.grante at isis.visi.com...
>    [snip]
>> "Sorry it's so long, I didn't have time to write it short."
>>
>> No idea where that quote is from, but I noticed in grad school that
>
>Pascal (as in, Blaise, the mathematician and philosopher -- not the
>programming language later named after him!-), in one of his letters.
>
>
>Alex
>
>
>

In the US, this is commonly attributed to Mark Twain.
Goethe seems to believe he found it in Cicero <URL: 
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0440.html >
and I've heard it ascribed to a pantheon of other
aphorists.  In any case, it does appear in Pascal's
*Lettres provinciales*, a book seminal both in theo-
logical apologetics and modern French prose style.
That's a rather different "one of his letters" than a
naive reader might understand.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html