Responding to Tony Harminc's polite dissent from his ideal-world formulation:
| Well, actually, no - the books often enough do no such thing.
Dougie Lawson wrote:
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In that case send reader's comments. Every online book has a CONTACT link at
the bottom of the page. Every PDF book has an email address or URL for
comments.
That process works well with IMS and DB2 books. I've been sending reader's
comments for best part of 30 years.
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I am a great admirer of Mr Lawson's work in his own bailiwicks. Who is not?
That said, this party-line response is unhelpful.
I have been sending comments about IBM books to the places nominated to
receive them for rather more than 40 years, and the results have been various.
In some cases, e.g., with the PrOp and the HLASM manuals, responses have been
prompt and, in the lawyer's sense of this word, responsive: errors have been
fixed, examples have been added, even what I perceived to be infelicities have
been addressed.
In many other cases, however, this has not been the case. Responses have been
pro forma, even perfunctory, and not at all responsive in the lawyer's sense of
this word; and nothing much has been done to remedy what I took to be these
other books' deficiencies.
Differences of this sort are to be expected in a very large, geographically
dispersed organization; but I have a suspicion, which has been voiced here
before, that IBM's internal use of PL/X instead of assembly language has led to
significant deterioration in the currency of the assembly-language
documentation that the rest of us, outside IBM, must still use.
My use of the word suspicion here is indeed a form of politesse. It is clear
that this has happened, that it is a problem, and that not enough has been done
within IBM to address it.
Reader's comments are desirable; I plan to continue mine; but they alone will
remedy these problems only in that long run in which, as Keynes reminded us, we
shall all be dead.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
