On Sat, 25 Jan 2014 12:12:55 -0500, Peter Relson wrote: >Further clarification: > >Today: If IEASYMxx tries to create a symbol with its value being "too >long", it is rejected. >Tomorrow: That same definition would be rejected similarly. > >There would be a way to indicate "I am creating this symbol and I >explicitly want you to let me provide a longer value than the name". >Likely that way would be by allowing a character in the symbol name that >is not currently allowed, and thus use of that symbol would be an overt, >and visual, indication of the new function. For such a symbol, there would >still be a maximum but it would not be the length of the symbol name. > Hypothetically, this would introduce the possibility of a new error mode: buffer overflow. I would hope that I would hope that such an error would be reported in the completion status of the hypothetical symbol resolution facility.
On Sat, 25 Jan 2014 18:30:01 -0500, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote: > >>The reality is that the choices lie between >>- changing nothing and ... to give them >>the "rope" and leave it to them to avoid doing something that >>"hurts". > >That's a false dichotomy. The actual choice lies among > > - Changing nothing > - Changing the behavior of the existing interface > - Adding a new interface while retaining the old one. > Well said, Shmuel. Of course if the implementation followed Peter's hypothetical technique a new interface would be required. Suppose the hypothetical distinguishing character is '_', not currently allowed in symbol names. So a programmer might have in his code "&FOO_BAR". Today the '_' terminates the symbol. With the hypothetical change, the symbol would be recognized not as "&FOO", but as "&FOO_BAR", which might have a different value, or be undefined. In order to avoid the need to inspect "thousands or millions of lines of code" in order to change every existing occurrence of "&FOO_" to &FOO._" the new interface is needed. The collateral benefit is that such a hypothetical new interface could have a mechanism for reporting errors such as buffer overflow. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
