On 10/7/24 05:39, Jonathan Scott wrote:
...
The standard rule is that if there's a reasonable chance that it
may work anyway, it's a warning. But warnings should definitely
not be ignored.
.
What "standard"?
I struggle to balance Doug Gwyn's maxim,. “Unix was not designed
to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop
you from doing clever things.”
with Postel's rule. I largely disagree with the latter. It
leads to needless chaos in code reviews.
A reviewer once marked down my SMP/E control statements
where I separated tokens with blanks, imitating examples
in the Ref. She noted correctly that the syntax there
required commas. I went to RCF (perhaps APAR). The
outcome was not to change the parser to follow the manual
nor to modify every syntax diagram, but to add a blanket
introduction that commas are optional, adding to the
knowledge burden of coders and reviewers.
And I once marked down an Assembler statement such as:
PRINT ,,,NOGEN
because the Ref. does not allow empty options on PRINT.
Experts told me I should know better.
Consider the cost of documenting flexibility and of
implementing mechanical syntax/style checkers.
I have used an assembler which, like Rexx, allowed
multiple labels on an instruction, or on no instruction
(blank opcode field.)
"L1: L2: L3: say 'Hello'"
granted, the hardware had little alignment requirement.
--
gil
