OK, I'm simmering down. Here's my concern: I own the SORT product; I own the CEC; I own the DASD. If I change any of those things and the user's output differs, then I'm on the spot to explain why. The explanation may not be difficult, but if a user presses with 'why didn't you tell us this would happen', I'm on the defensive for an outcome I can't control or even anticipate. I don't like being on the defensive. You don't score points on defense even if you survive to battle another day. OK, I'm done.
. . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 1:13 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: SORT not behaving consistently On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:58:40 -0400, Charles Mills wrote: >I think I respectfully disagree. Sometimes particular combinations of options >yield unspecified behavior. Sure, computers are generally deterministic but >the results might be dependent on region size or some other "irrelevant" >variable. > Mostly agree. But once I was furious with a compiler vendor when my program got fixed-point overflow when optimized and operated as I intended when I compiled in debug mode. Vendor said WAD; the construct I depended on was documented as unpredictable. Grrr. Any errors detected in production mode should be reported in debug mode, especially if the unspecified behavior is deterministic. (In debug mode, the compiler generated STH; LH of a halfword variable not otherwise referenced, truncating an invalid halfword value. Even before that, I had felt that by design STH should program check on such a condition.) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
