[Info-vax] Why so much Unix envy?

[David Froble]

Shark8 wrote:
> On 9/3/2014 8:43 AM, bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>> Hogwash.  Now we are blaming the tool again for the incompetence of the
>> workman.
> 
> I think it's rather a circular relationship:
> (a) The culture espouses a "Worse Is Better" philosophy, encouraging
> (b) a "just get a compile" mentality, leading to
> (c) turning off (or ignoring) warnings for large portions of the program
> (d) which itself contributes to management being steered toward 
> practices encouraging (a) and training "front-line" programmers that 
> "Worse Is Better".
> 
> My point isn't that the programmers [and management] aren't blameless, 
> they carry much blame -- but the tools themselves ought to be examined 
> too, for they are /not/ blameless, as they almost encourage these 
> behaviors.
> 
> One particular instance that most tooling shows its inferiority is in 
> how it handles source-code: plain text. Given what we *know* about 
> handling program semantics it's shameful that most source-code 
> repositories are whitespace sensitive, recording non-semantic changes at 
> the same level of import as semantic changes. (i.e. something trivial 
> and unimportant, like some guy with a preference for spaces instead of 
> tabs for indentation altering the source to his style is recorded at the 
> same level as altering an algorithm to fix/introduce an edge-case.)
> 
>> Most Pascal compilers will let you turn off things like Range
>> Checking and Bounds Checking.  Is that a flaw in the language?
> 
> IIRC, that's a compiler option and not addressed by the standard. 
> (Though I don't think I ever read the *whole* language standard, so it 
> might actually be in there.)

Sounds to the casual observer (in my case very casual) that you need to 
be careful what someone else asks for, cause you might get it ...

Somebody most likely asked for the capability for ignoring compiler 
warnings.  Or not, what do I know ....