From: Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> Date: 04/07/2013 05:40 PM
<SNIPPAGE> 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. <SNIPPAGE> In a subsequent post to this one, you acknowledge that SMP/E makes use of them for macro updates and the like. Certain products from IBM, and definitely in times gone by products by ISVs, did statement updates instead of having to send the whole source. So you got the source when you got the product. All fixes from that point on were the changes to the source that you had (here is where source deck comes in, and is now used by us old-timers -- because we are just familiar with the phrase?). One of my questions to the COBOL x4 standards team (?) was, if you get rid of sequence numbers, how does one do source maintenance w/o shipping a whole program? And if I do ship the whole program, how does the end user make their customizations match from source ship to source ship. I then pointed to a specific IBM product that needed that very feature. [The ensuing questions and emails between me and IBM were a bit funny, because the COBOL language people had no idea that CPCS was shipped as source.] As a result this wonderful language, Java, has no sequence numbers, can be wider than your wide LCD panels. Now you need to make a change to something because of a bug report. How do you note the fix? And how do you send it? So far as I have seen, you pretty much re-release the whole product. And this is progress? So we have now succeeded in throwing the baby out and kept the bath water. Regards, Steve Thompson Opinions expressed by this poster do not necessarily reflect those of poster's employer. Come to think of it, probably don't reflect those held by the rest of populous on this planet either. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
