[HECnet] Re: VMS sources

[Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-]

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> writes: 

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On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <
system at tmesis.com> wrote: 

The "listing" portion is far more valuable than the source > itself. >

Amen - although I might say - "was often   more valuable"   -- if you had
a bug needed to fix it fast, the key you could (which is the cry of the
FOSS movement).     You did not have to wait for the vendor. 

But more often than note, the reason you wanted to see the source was to
understand a behavior what was happening that did not make sense. 
Sometimes, you might find a bug, but more often than not, I might find a
way to do what i wanted to do with what I had in hand, 

I recently (well OK, 9 months ago) discovered a day-one bug in the OpenVMS
Itanium primitives for self-relative queue manipulation.   While I have the
source listings, I found it far easier to explore what was happening using
the "poor-man's microfiche" and ANALYZE/CRASH.   I wrote an extensive blog
on it.   It was one of the last bugs that Clair Grant worked before he was
made an OpenVMS Engineering outcast. :(   Point is that with the right tool,
you can figure out what's going on.   In the days of the listings on fiche,
I found it often much easier to look at the code in SDA than to lug about
the fiche reader and ruin my eyesight.

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker       VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.