On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
> Also remember when perusing the LE publications that the inventors of LE in > their wisdom thought it would be too clear to the uninitiated to call the > languages dependent on Language Environment "languages," choosing instead > to > further overload the word "member." > And let's not get started on enclaves and all that... > > it is made easy, for one C function to call another C function > > What does that have to do with LE? No other platform that I know of has LE, > but on every platform cannot a C function trivially call another C > function? > Otherwise wouldn't every C program have to consist simply of one humongous > main()? All high level languages on all platforms have a runtime that provides the magic behind the curtain. Ours happens to be called LE. However, most others are vastly more transparent and obvious than LE - the main point of which was *NOT* so that C functions could call other C functions, but so that multiple varieties of PL/1 and COBOL programs could call each other. Yes folks, that baby really is ugly. LE is old and crufty for lots of reasons and the doc you need to make sense of it is smeared across multiple publications and as myth and legends in the tribal mind. To quote a former president of ours; "I feel your pain". Please count this as the 2012 edition of my now long-standing semi-annual rant about LE. I will now retire from the discussion before mortally offending my IBM friends. -- This email might be from the artist formerly known as CC (or not) You be the judge. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
