On 7/7/2015 5:54 PM, Mike Walter wrote:
> 1) because by using HOLE it becomes clearer to future plumbers
> maintaining that particular pipe that the original author
> specifically did not intend to process output from those lookup
> output...
> 2) rather than having accidentally deleted needed lines which had
> handled such lookup output during an unfortunate late-night XEDIT
> session.   :-)

However, it can also have the unintended consequence of making your
program process more of the input than you want it to.  If you need to
read a file up to the first occurrence of something, connecting the
unused outputs to HOLE stages will make your pipeline read all the rest
of the file, too, and do a bunch of useless work.

If you *need* to stop reading the input, then it's worse than just
useless.  If you're reading from something like STARMSG that will keep a
connection openfor as long as you keep reading, stray HOLE stages can
make it impossible for your program *ever* to finish.

¬R

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