On Fri, 2012-06-15 at 16:22 -0400, Ed Gould wrote: > Manual reading has always been an issue. For year we have been asking > IBM to write clear and useful manuals. > Somewhere around the mid 1990's IBM seem to have done a reverse and > either stop issuing manuals (eg COBOL MESSAGES AND CODES) or made > them so complicated to read (COBOL conversion guide)
Ed, allow a dissenting vote please. I'm not sympathetic to calls for a COBOL "messages" book (which you've championed since at least 2009) and find the compiler messages sufficiently lucid. I've spent quite a lot of time in the past few months becoming reacquainted with the COBOL Language Reference, and I give the authors respect. COBOL is a big beast, with lots of corner cases and little inconsistencies and gotchas. You joke about having to be a lawyer to read some of the documentation, but I've recently needed to know certain defined behavior, where I counted on "legal" precision. They're the implementers, and only they can provide the details we need. > The COBOL conversion manual is probably the clearest case of manual > writers gone wrong. Why? What's the problem there? -- David Andrews A. Duda & Sons, Inc. [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
