In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 07/19/2005 at 09:33 AM, Bill Fairchild <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>Overlooking a reference to an instruction about to be changed with a >patch What is at issue is changing a datum that is not an instruction. Such data typically have more references than instructions do, and the references are more likely to be unrelated to each other. >Similarly overlooking a reference to a source code instruction >about to be reassembled may also cause adverse affects. Only rarely will changing a literal reference in a source line cause problems that could have been avoided by reading the code that referred to that line. >Clearly the problem here is the overlooking rather than the level of >atrocity with which the source instruction was coded. The atrocity lies in the person that did the zap, not in the source code. The assembler automates handling of literal without problems, and there's nothing wrong with source code that uses them. The problem comes in when someone bypasses the assembler in the name of "efficiency" and steps on his own fingers. It's the equivalent of putting a copper penny in a fuse box so you don't have to be bothered with changing fuses. >There are times when a patch is necessitated because there is no >source code. BTDTGTS. That doesn't mean that people should write code on the assumption that they will lose the source. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html> We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html