On 8/16/2014 4:43 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: >> http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/canonical-devices.html > > I just read thru that from every direction. > > Not one character was wasted to recommend a way to enumerate multiple > inputs to differentiate the first from the last. No wonder we have such a > mish-mash that cannot now be corrected without breaking every machine > config we've ever built. > > Yeah, it could be fixed, but the screams of gored oxen will reverberate > all thru the land. So we are doomed to deal with that legacy forever I'd > imagine.
There comes a time in many a software project when it's best to just toss it all and start over instead of trying to support all that has come before. One of the big reasons to do that is correcting long-standing problems, but to do so requires changing how one goes about writing the code for the part where the problem is. One case was the Netscape web browser. It had a very annoying problem with forms where after clicking the button to submit the form it'd just sit there for a while then go to an error "Document contains no data.". But while Netscape was twiddling its digital thumbs, the same form could be filled out and submitted successfully with Internet Explorer. The Netscape crew never would admit the problem existed and each time they supposedly started over on the browser from scratch, they managed to reproduce that same problem. Eventually they just removed the error message so the browser would just give up on sending the data without popping up an error window. Click the button and watch the spinning hourglass for a while... then nothing happens but the cursor returns to the arrow and the form wasn't sent. Could be that some of their coders were using old pieces of code to save time, or it could have been the way they "knew how to do it" on that part of the code and wrote new code that worked just as poorly as the old code - replicating the bug in a slightly different way. How many ways would LCNC benefit from a major "house cleaning" to clear out dusty old bits that have been deprecated, "spaghetti code" and other things that have been let go for a while? --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
