On 9/10/07, John P. Hartmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > By now, I'm sure Bob would be a lot less confused if he had just read > the paper.
The fascinating part however is that you can certainly pass the novice plumber exam without understanding commit levels at all. Most stages written in REXX almost automatically do the right thing because of the default behavior. The way I would explain this to my dog while walking in the woods (so an informal description without the ability to show something online) is that anything you do before touching records from the pipeline is considered part of your initialization, and a stage has the ability to exit before touching the records if it decides that is appropriate. Normally a REXX stage only needs to bother with commit levels explicitly if it wants to use a pipeline to do the initialization (so before touching the records in the real pipeline). Rob
