Two Birds with One Stone

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <213 at brl-tgr.ARPA> cottrell at nbs-vms.arpa (COTTRELL, JAMES) writes:
>But it's OK for you to insult me publicly, eh? GFY.

In this one, Jim, you're absolutely right & so I'm going to waste a
few bytes for a public apology.  What was intended as a clever twist
on the message it was answering came out as a gratuitous insult.  I
keep telling myself not to try anything "clever" after midnight ...

I apologise.

But, would you mind telling me what "GFY" stands for?  I can't find
it in any of my lexicons ...

I even agree with you that the VAX has one of the nicer architectures
to work with in the industry.  I agree with you that segments (and the
whole architecture of the 80X86 machines) are abominable.  And I do
n o t  enjoy contorting my code to fit a lot of odd machines.

But I enjoy even less taking my code (which I think I understand), or
worse yet someone else's code (which may or may not have been written
for comprehensibility), if it was originally engineered to work only
on one machine, and tearing my hair out finding all the clever little
tricks that couldn't possibly work on my machine.  (Since some of the
machines I work on are VAXen, you'd think this was less of a problem --
but at least one is System V v. 2 r. 2 and then some.)  Out of concern
for my own future sanity (what there may be of it ;-)) and courtesy
for others who may have to live with my code, I make the slight extra
effort to try to always code so that I can use my code an any of my
systems.  And I use the word "slight" advisedly.  By making these
practices into habits, most of them are no pain at all to include in
new code; and I do not spend hours agonising over whether each
construct will break on some obscure machine.  Only if it's at all
likely that it will be used on that obscure machine; and then, it
usually doesn't take hours.

The gain?  Well, I have a number of tools, including a set of file-
system repair tools, that will run under Xenix, System V, 4.2 BSD,
4.1 BSD, V7, and I think even V6 (although it's been so long since
I used that that I've stopped checking).  Minimal effort was needed
to port them, except for some of the 4.2 file-system programs.  (4.1
is closer to System V than either is to 4.2!)  I think it was worth
it, since I have to work on all of these.  When I get a chance to
post them, I'll bet you'll be happier than if I had hard-coded my
machine in, too.

But, as I said before, I know that my arguments don't really impress
you, and yours don't all impress me.  I was just asking that we stop
slinging stuff around the net -- and here I am doing it again.  It
must be after midnight.  Bye.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}