Mark van Gulik <ghoul6 at home.com> wrote:
	I love to nitpick, so I'd like to point out that you picked two 
	(that I know of) bad examples out of four.  The Bible is a 
	collection of unrelated letters, books, songs, etc. (if it were 
	"assembled" today it would probably include tunes from TV 
	jingles, soup can labels, and random phone book pages).

The "biblia" (plural) for which the Bible is named are not unrelated.
Having been written before the invention of chapter and verse numbering,
they couldn't include proper XPointers, but later books are riddled with
quotations from and allusions to earlier ones.  (One can also say the
same for the Talmud and the Church Fathers, of course.)

One way in which "ta biblia" make a good example for modularisation is
precisely this strong one-way linkage.  You _can_ carve the collection
up (at chronological "joints"), but the pieces cannot all stand alone.
For example, if you chop the collection into the Torah-Nabiim-Kethuvim
(spelling?) on one side and the Christian writings on the other, the Old
Testament holds together, but the New Testament becomes largely unintelligble.
Within the Tanach, the Prophets depend on the Torah.

In terms we've seen in this mailing list, I suppose you could say that
the New Testament is a DeltaModule.

	Lord of the Rings is also a series of books, if I recall 
	correctly (I don't know whether J.R.R.T. intended this, or if it 
	was a publishing "artifact").

The first copy I ever had was a single volume.  The division of "works"
into "books" or "volumes" goes back to classical times:  there was only
so much you could fit on one scroll.  In the case of TLOTR, the physical
divisions do no violence to the logical structure of the book, but a
hierarchical structure (work, book, chapter, paragraph, sentence) does
not a modular structure mark.  Try the first book on its own:  Here's a
story, how does it end?  Try the last book on its own:  Who _are_ these
characters?  You might as well call an ANSI Pascal program "modular"
because it's structured.