The burden of what I am saying is that a Language Reference is not a tutorial introduction. There may well be a place and market for an HLASM for dummies publication, but making the LR into one is not, in my view, a good idea.
I never said "tutorial". I believe that it can and should be a far better reference. Even with all the experience I have in Assembler, I still find it to be unnecessarily difficult to find information within it. Several things would make it better:
- Better TOC'ing and indexing
- Better examples
- Repetition of relevant/related information wherever needed. (Chasing bread crumbs is for the birds!)
- Better thought out examples
- A general rewrite from a fresh mindset.
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At 8/19/2011 10:57 AM, john gilmore wrote:
There has been some discussion of these manuals on IBM-MAIN. Its main thrust appears to be that they should be dumbed down. (This terminology is of course avoided.)
My own view is that no fundamental rethinking of either their organization or content is required.
Detailed improvements are sometimes needed.
An example. I conducted a client workshop on the macro language in July; and during it I realized for the first time that too many questions about the syntax of the BIFs were coming up because the LR examples of their use all feature constant arguments when some at least (and in my view most) of them should feature set-symbol ones instead. I have a memo for John Ehrman about this in the works; in my experience he has always been receptive to such suggestions; and making them is, I think, the way to get such changes made.
The burden of what I am saying is that a Language Reference is not a tutorial introduction. There may well be a place and market for an HLASM for dummies publication, but making the LR into one is not, in my view, a good idea.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
