In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 07/02/2005
at 12:05 AM, Joe Zitzelberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>That was viewing it with SDSF.
Then why did you write ISPF?
>There is an old joke
Compiler error messagtes are not supposed to be jokes.
>If a person writing Cobol is not conversant with Cobol then the best
> thing that can happen to them is a "Read the LRM" message.
No; such messages are singularly unhhelpful. It *might* be helpful to
direct them to a specific section of the LRM.
>Compilers are not chain-saws,
Well, they're not supposed to be, but when you have a large number of
opaque message that the authors incorrectly believe to be self
documenting, they might as well be.
>Using your theory above, one would think that a programmer moving
>from an APOS to a non-APOS shop would be paralyzed with fear at the
> sight of "" characters?
You obviously don't un derstand my theory.
>You have repeatedly asked for things that are already provided by
>the current message.
ROTF.LMAO! Not even close. I have asked for, e.g., a quote in hex of
the offending text, an explanation of what SI/SO are all about, and
those are *not* in the message.
>The message does provide context for the programmer,
You seem to have a strange idea of what context is; none of my
dictionaries define it as "the column number of the character in
error." There is no rational way to read "context for a programmer who
doesn't know about DBCS" as refering to a column number.
>The listing already provides the 'bad text' with the message.
Which part of "in hexadecimal" don't you understand? If you believe it
is unnecessary, say so, but to claim that it is there is dishonest.
>The LRM provides both of these
What is at issue is what is in the error message, not what is in the
LRM.
>Either their technical writers are as dumb as the average Cobol
>programmer or there truly are 'self-evident' message in the problem
> space of computer programming.
Or it will be fixed the first time someone submits an RCF.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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