Gavin Kistner wrote:
> On May 30, 2005, at 7:40 AM, Stefan Kaes wrote:
>> This comes up again and again because the current behaviour is
>> inconsistent with the proudly stated principle of least suprise.
>
> Matz has stated repeatedly that the POLS is *not* supposed to be
> applied to everyone. It is obviously impossible to provide little-or-
> no surprise to everyone, given that people have different
> expectations.

Another point about surprises: when considering information theory suprise
is an important thing and only surprises make us learn something.
Consider a channel that transfers only 1's.  You cannot derive any
information from the next 1 you receive (entropy = 0).  If the channel
spits out 0's and 1's you have higher entropy and higher information
content.  The entropy is related to the level of surprise you experience
when you receive a symbol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy

In short: surprise isn't bad alltogether.

Kind regards

    robert