On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 11:35:37 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: > >> I dislike sequence numbers anyway > >A completely different topic, but sequence numbers are obviously (I think. Am >I wrong?) entirely a vestigial organ left from the days of punched cards. They >were a lifesaver if you dropped your cards on the floor, and the compilers put >out a warning if you loaded the cards into the reader in incorrect order. > I understand that the 709 (sometimes) read cards in row binary format, two 36-bit words to a row, so 8 columns were inaccessible. (You could select which 8 with a wiring board). This pretty much solidified the number 8.
But do sequence numbers have a lick of value today? > Shmuel and some of my coworkers think so. A telling observation is that few editors other than from the IBM culture implement them. BASIC used them both for editing and GOTO targets. Long ago, a colleague described to me a SDS/Xerox Sigma system that kept program source in something akin to a KSDS. The line numbers were the keys, and absolutely essential. Hardly portable. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
