Reentrancy may be preferred, but it is not always reasonable or even possible. Each situation must be evaluated on its own merits.
I always -try- to write reentrant code. However, I sometimes find that a non-reentrant coding technique is a more suitable approach. Programmers must have both the -training- and -experience- to be able to select the best approach in each situation. John P Baker Software Engineer -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of john gilmore Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 08:54 To: [email protected] Subject: Is the teaching of non-reentrant HLASM coding practices ever defensible? This "pedagogic argument" is a hoary one that cannot be dismissed out of hand. Complexities must sometimes be deferred. Newtonian mechanics, which has its own legitimate and useful purview, is for example taught first, before relativistic mechanics, in physics curricula. Deference to what Sir Thomas Browne politely called 'junior understanding' is, however, too frequent. To teach techniques that have no legitimate non-pedagogic uses is, I think, indefensible. Browne also said that ". . . to produce a clear and warrantable body of truth we must forget and part with much we know"; and too many of the notions that we must jettison have been inflicted upon us by our teachers. Today assembly language is a putatively 'advanced' topic; it is not usually learned first; and students who are already familiar with storage classes (with the differences among static, LIFO automatic, and non-LIFO heap storage) can and should be introduced to reentrant assembly-language methods at the outset of their training. John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
