Re: "Shared" procedure division code


"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3ks2bvF100lu4U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Oh Dear! I pressed a button... sorry Chuck.

Well, yeah; the question is what does that button imply?

> Yes, my post was intended for IBMers. In future I'll make that clear.

I think it goes deeper than that. You used phrases like "urban myth",
"reincarnate a stupid practice that was buried in the '70's" and "in today's
environment this is irrelevant". Such categorizations *encourage others*
to limit their views to the IBM environment *and* to hold all other
environments in similar contempt.

> And, within THAT universe my comments were general.

Well, that's part of the problem. Planetary system, maybe. Galaxy,
arguably. By definition there is but *one* universe, and the Unisys MCP
environment is part of that universe.

How do such things strike me? Try this as a *reductio ad absurdum* example,
tongue planted firmly in cheek:

"After all, everybody who's anybody knows that there's been no excuse for
operating in any environment in which it's inappropriate to align a packed
field (at either end) on anything but an 8-bit boundary, or to declare such
a field as unsigned, for at least 35 years. Machines that impose or even
endorse such stupid practices and limitations should have been consigned to
the trash heap of history and are certainly irrelevant to any well-informed
professional in today's computer science environment, and any programmer who
thinks such conventions have any value whatever is clearly a dinosaur ... "

It's not just the fact that your remarks didn't include the explicit caveat
that they were limited *strictly* to a particular environment, it's the
categorical nature of your characterizations that bothered me, in and of
itself. We've been through this a while back with Other Folk on this forum,
and I had some hope you wouldn't descend to that level of contemptuous
categorizations, particularly when there are clear exceptions ...

-Chuck Stevens


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