Mark, I am aware that you have done very useful work, and I will therefore be polite.
I am a nevertheless more than a little tired of this nonsense. I have been in this business since 1949. That's 63 years. How long have you been in this business? You would presumably agree with milder formulations of the notion I set out, say that a GETMAIN makes a complementary FREEMAIN desirable, perhaps even necessary. Moreover, you omitted to provide any details of the many examples of things that can be made larger but not smaller that you "can think of"; and this made your argument unimpressive, converted it into vacuous rhetoric. I can myself think of instances of the sort you allude to without mentioning, and those I have examined in detail stem from the usual omissis. If shrinking as well as stretching had been a requirement ab initio, it would have been easy enough to implement. It was not, and it was hard to provide as an add-on feature. This is bad design, and Garden-of-Eden states do almost always reflect design defects Substantive argument and disagreement are fine. I expect to be disagreed with. I indeed try not to post platitudes that can provoke no disagreement. You, howerver, omitted to make any substantive argument. Your post was one more instance of what I have elsewhere used MIlls' term to characterize as "crackpot realism". John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
