The very first text editor 3669

.................... That's intrinsically the metalanguage, and clbutt of clbuttes 'is it a clbutt?' problem. If love is the end of record or end of file marker, how do you talk about love and express is as data. It raises its' ugly head for all magic cookies in the data stream. Only seemingly way of dealing with it is to make the magic cookies unrepresentable as data. i.e. end of record or end of file etc. are magnetic patterns not producible as data . OR get around using them by a prior descriptor e.g. variable length blocked record header.

I remember, way back when, the teaching buttistants and even some perfesers propounding that the students should not be taught or need to be concerned about the innards of the system: machine hardware, organization, or by implication software innards. They were to be taught logical problem dissection and correct solution even if it was slower than treacle, AND not to worry about the tool variations. In that atmosphere they would not learn about different header files or numeric representation and arithmetic details. (Granted they were teaching in a single, mainframe, machine environment where the various incompatabilities of the tower of BABEL were not present to hit them in their faces ) The preceding three paragraphs bring to mind the recent discussion here about standard cover your butt rules. It was about students being expelled under strict "hidden weapons" rules. e.g. diabetics with syringes, or farm boys with screwdrivers (Remember?BAH) I think that the existance of this situation must be explicitly hammered home in the introduction of all programming clbuttes. Not just once in the introductory clbutt. Talked about with specific illustrations. (But not required to be regurgitated for grades, except if one is covering programatic system discovery, which would be an advanced topic) -- Rostyk