It is difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that Paul Gilmartin's latest post in this thread was disingenuous. He is not, moreover, the only or, certainly, the most egregious offender. There is much anecdotal evidence that secondary-school debating-society posts all but empty of substantive content are becoming more and more common here.
LOWER and UPPER are certainly HLASM macro-language, i.e., assembly-time, BIFs. Equally, they are C and PL/I, i.e., execution-time, BIFs. They are all, no matter what their binding times, specializations of the System/360 TRanslate instruction [when they are implemented in even minimally intelligent fashion]. In the case of PL/I, which makes a much more general TRANSLATE BIF available, they are also gratuitous, provided for the convenience of quondam C programmers accustomed to thinking and coding at much lower levels of generality.) Binding-time decisions can be important, even crucial; but what can be done early can usually, almost always be done late too. Mr. Gilmartin thus has thing ass backwards. Premature bindings are almost always the culprits. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA Avant d'imprimer cet e-mail, réfléchissons à l'impact sur l'environnement. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
