winscape 2384

Oh, I see what you're saying. I thought you were talking about "pure" code; it doesn't call other routines written in something else.

That's the first thing kiddies would do; and usually our first SPRs on the doc. This was in the bad ol' days when the documentation wasn't shipped with the code (but a year or two later). We finally solved this "transcription" problem by cut-pasting actual TTY hardcopy output onto the repros. That is why a lot of the documenation examples you saw was not a nice clear printout.

One of our writers also decided that she would check out her documentation by actually using the software she was writing about. One of my side goals to get all documentation in bits (rather than on typewritten pages) was to gently force writers to use what they were writing about.

I can't tell how many man-days I had to waste to try to explain to certain writers why they were wrong. Some of them had absolutely no concept of what software was.

This is what I was talking about. The further away kiddies get from "seeing" the hardware, the less they will know about its existence.

Oh, let's not go into this again. I don't have the energy and I don't think my brain is thinking clearly enough to wrestle with you :-). A couple years ago, Morten summarized what he thought I meant which was almost correct; although he may know more about how I think than I do because he knows about the ways of DEC compebreastors. enough.

Oh, my dear. You certainly can tell. :-)

She was not permanently trainable. If you write machine language, you have to be extremely trainable. Especially in how the code is formatted in the source. The most important thing about machine language products is that somebody else can pick up and fix it or add to it.

This lack of adaption to what appeared as a studid formatting rule was how we winnowed the idiots. People who could not learn, or worse yet, refused to adapt would only cost money and customer lossage in the future....or, and law suit probabilities rose steeply higher.

This applied to all of those posters. Beth's lack of logical thinking and pushing hidden agendas at all costs is even worse.

BAH