Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Martha, I do see your point. Generally speaking it might just be one of those empty bizspeak phrases. In the context in which I work, that of a financial regulator, I think it has a similar value to the phrase "without prejudice" at the top of a legal letter.
In other words, the document is not being provided in fulfilment of some legal obligation to disclose it, but the company is sending it voluntarily. It is thus intended solely to provide information, not to be used as or in place of formal reporting. I suppose it may also have the implication that the recipient has no right to demand the information (in future) just because in the past the company voluntarily provided it.

Whether or not the phrase strictly speaking adds anything, if the authors insist on including it I just want to be sure I use an idiomatically correct form.

martha said:

Or, come to think of it, eons ago when I was at The Washington Post, if a word-processing program crashed, a message would flash across the screen:

AN IMPOSSIBLE EVENT HAS JUST OCCURRED.

Say whut?

That's kind of how I feel about “for information purposes.” Isn't giving that information a little redundant? Or is there some specific use I'm missing here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assertion_(computing)

That's an assertion in a program where the programmer was being clever.

Here's an example in Perl 5.

sub get_treatment {
    my $animal = shift;
    my $treatment;

    if ( $animal->isa('cat') ) {
         $treatment = 'milk';
    }
    elsif ( $animal->isa('dog') ) {
         $treatment = 'broth';
    }
    # get_treatment() only knows about cats and dogs
    # this next else block should never happen
    else {
         die "It's not a cat, no is it a dog!    This is impossible!";
    }
    return $treatment;
}

Here it is in English.

If the animal is a cat, the treatment is milk.
Otherwise, if the animal is a dog, the treatment is broth.
For everything else, jump up and down while exclaiming "It's not a cat, nor is it a dog!  This is impossible!"

Programmers are presumably humans, who make mistakes. Most of them are aware of at least the fact that they make mistakes. It's often better to display a strange error message than to do nothing. In the example above, if the program returned nothing or anything other than milk or broth, it would cascade problems further down in the program which would be extremely difficult to debug, rather than making it obvious where the problem is at the earliest opportunity.