I'd prefer DWIAM,NWYTIM. At the current state of the art, DWIM is a cruel hoax.
OTOH, it's amusing to see some of the truly demented suggestions for spelling corrections. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Phil Smith III <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2018 7:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: So much for THAT excuse | Computerworld SHARK TANK Tom Brennan wrote, in part: >Maybe someday everything will be like Google, so I can type DNS= (which >I do often enough) and the system will ask me "Did you mean DSN?" 30+ years ago, a friend wrote a CMS ENDCMD NUCEXT (a routine that got control at the end of a console command) called DWIM - Do What I Mean. It would look for failed return codes, analyze the command, and "fix" it. Of course since he'd written it, it worked as he'd expect it to. And he still HATED it. Maybe a lesson? Gil wrote: >I wanted more to focus on file names than on commands and keywords. I.e. with >STOW I can create members "foobar ", "FooBar ", and "FOOBAR ", all in the >same >PDS directory, but I can can access only one of them with TSO ALLOCATE or JCL >DD >or ... . One of those behaviors has to be wrong. Absolutely. To be blunt, not sure how this relates to whether case sensitivity is good or bad-a badly done *anything* is bad, right? Gil also wrote: >A half-century ago, I saw a magazine article suggesting that FORTRAN > (*the* language then) should treat '0' and 'O' as interchangable. OK. >I can write "C0NTINUE" instead of "CONTINUE". But it restricts the name >space for variables. (And I wondered if '0' and 'O' confusion was the >nub of the SHARK TANK CICS article.) Heh. Another friend once wrote a program using variables that were all named combinations of one, eye, zero, and oh. He gave up trying to debug it. I'd have voted against such a requirement; there are opportunities in pretty well any programming language to get in that sort of trouble. A VERY long time ago-almost 40 years-I was helping a user with a FORTRAN program. We could not figure out why it seemed like it wasn't executing a particular statement. Finally we realized that it followed a block comment with one too many Cs: C This is C a block C comment that C goes on for a while C X = 3 Oops. Not to be confused with the user who went to great pains to ensure that every comment line started with a C: COMPLETE THE OPERATION, TRANSFERRING CONTROL TO THE OTHER PROGRAM, WHICH CAN THEN... Looked VERY weird, since the brain said, "Those aren't comments!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
