RE: [ID 20000125.002] Problem in documentation of Fcntl constants

["Warren Odom" <warren-odom@stenocall.com>]

<<I think you are overreaching....Sounds like people are too uptight.>>

Man, now I kinda wish you'd been there to support me in the newsgroup!  I
was just condensing and relaying to you the main points of opposition that
were raised there, as I defended my use of addition.  But, as I said, even I
had to ultimately abandon that defense.  (Of course, you are quite welcome
to add your comments to the newsgroup thread.)

<<And Perl has historically expected people to use 1, 2, 4, and 8.  It's
only recently that the constants were available.>>

Well, yes, there are lots of things that mankind did before better solutions
were available.  In my early programming years, I probably would have
maintained that addition was just as good as OR-ing, and numeric constants
just as good as symbolic ones-but not since I was taught good programming
practice.  Every book and article on the subject has symbolic constants as
one of the "must do" things.

But I don't see why any objection would be raised to saying "or" instead of
"add" in the documentation.  It's so each to change.  After all, every Perl
book on my "CD Bookshelf" (including yours) that covers these constants
either says to use OR, or refers to the flock manpage which also says to use
OR.

And, again, using addition gives the wrong answer.

           -- Warren

---

References to:

Tom Christiansen <tchrist@chthon.perl.com>

---

[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index][Thread Index][Top&Search][Original]

---