[Info-vax] portable sequential file formats (was: Re: Couple of questions on VMS -> world)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-19 19:59:04 +0000, John Reagan said:

> Ron is a good friend but I think he did a disservice by using BLISS' 
> preprocessor to simply generate 99 PUT_TEXT statements.  Cute?  Yes.  
> An example of BLISS that most people could read & understand?  No.

There are Bliss modules around with very substantial preprocessor 
macros that generate massive quantities of code and/or data, with 
resulting program code somewhere between complex and entirely 
inscrutable.  Debugging those can be... interesting.   Like C, Bliss is 
(was) used as a portable assembler.  With Bliss programs incorporating 
multiple-page macros and some of those macros with multiple component 
macros,... eventually you're probably not using the right tool with 
Bliss and macros, or maybe your current tool is missing useful features 
such as abstraction or encapsulation.   OOBliss.  That'll give a few 
folks nightmares.



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