Text File

Aucbvax.5823 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Sun Jan 17 00:53:32 1982 Standards >From FC01@USC-ECL Sat Jan 16 23:18:57 1982 I was wondering about peoples attitudes towards standards in systems and programming languages. I somehow manage to often get caught in the midst of an argument/discussion about some so called standard. As an example, I am currently in a drawn out flaming session about (of all things) what user name to give users on a Unix system. Now it all started when I asked people what they wanted their user IDs to be. Is that a sin! I was met with three opinions, my own being that people should get any userID they want, and if they don't care to specify one initials are as good as anything else. Alas the arguments came: 'You should force people to use their ARPA-NET name' 'You should default to the arpanet name' 'you should use last names' 'you should allow choice and default to <ARPANET/LAST> name', ... etc. I guess good healthy dissagreement is a good thing, and people should be aware of all the options available to them, but I just can't see people getting all in a a huff about things that are features. I am pleased with any feature I find, but I don't live or die by them. I don't call people fools or turkeys just because they don't have my favorite version of my favorite feature in their version of my favorite <LANGUAGE/EDITOR/COMMAND INTERPRETER/...>. I don't think that all fortran (and yes even Cobol) programmers are in the last century. I do however think that every system should have a good macro processor that allows the user to flexibly determine the user interface desired for any given type of usage, and allows a reasonable degree of system feature/drawback independance. I guess I am crazy, but I find that fortran 4 is transportable almost anywhere with little trouble if you keep to the standard, and I try to just so I can remain free of system quirks. I also use more or less standard lisp 1.5 or so features to avoid the pain of changing lisps. I also use the individual debugging features, etc, but try to keep my code pure. So the next time you feel like flaming about such things, be glad you have what you can get, try to make life better for yourself by asking if better things exist, but don't insult your own intelligence by using abusive phrases like I sometimes do. Fred -------

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.