In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 10/14/2006
at 02:56 PM, Charles Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>Not to dispute any of your main points but I think the COBOL compiler
>messages have always been "self-documenting" -- back at least to 1974
>and OS/VS COBOL.
There's an old joke attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
Q: If I have two apples in one hand and two oranges in the other,
and tell you that one of the apples is an orange, how many
oranges do I have?
A: Three.
Q: No, just because I tell you that an apple is an orange doesn't
make it an orange.
Well, just because IBM has been telling us since OS/360 in the 1960's
that COBOL messages are self documenting doesn't make them self
documenting.
--
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)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
