I've had the scroll up-or-down conversation many times over the years since I learned that my colleagues actually disagreed over which usage is 'correct'. I'm convinced that it's a matter of mental perception embodied in language, not merely a linguistic quirk adopted willy-nilly.
Some people truly perceive scrolling on a 3270 screen as a rectangular window moving up or down over a fixed body of text nailed to the background. Others perceive the text itself as moving up or down--like a rolled scroll--behind a rectangular window nailed in front. People will argue their view, and their terminology, quite emphatically. The scroll bar on a web screen introduces another wrinkle. You move the bar down to see the bottom of the data, up to see the top. Case closed? I think not. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anne & Lynn Wheeler Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2017 4:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: curious: why S/360 & decendants are "big endian". [email protected] (John McKown) writes: > Same in other books I've seen. Why? Probably because we write from > top to bottom. We write the lowest first, at the top, and the highest > last, at the bottom. And then we confuse everybody by calling them > "ascending" memory addresses while writing them in a descending > pattern. English is a _stupid_ language. in the 70s as fullscreen 3270s editors were starting to appear, there was big editor culture wars over up & down. prior to that, line-editing was from perspective of the user ... "up" moving towards the "top" (beginning) of the file and "down" was moving towards the "bottom" (end) of the file. The side that had enhanced previous line editors to support 3270 fullscreen and preserved the up/down orientation (meaning). A couple of "new" 3270 fullscreen editors, done from scratch, insisted on "up" was from the orientation of the program (not the user), the program would move the file up ... towards the bottom of the file or move the file "down" ... towards the top of the file (difference was` whether up/down was from the human perspective or the program/software perspective). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
