Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> writes: --e89a8f64310498553304d2cd77d8 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- < system at tmesis.com> wrote: The "listing" portion is far more valuable than the source > itself. > Amen - although I might say - "was often more valuable" -- if you had a bug needed to fix it fast, the key you could (which is the cry of the FOSS movement). You did not have to wait for the vendor. But more often than note, the reason you wanted to see the source was to understand a behavior what was happening that did not make sense. Sometimes, you might find a bug, but more often than not, I might find a way to do what i wanted to do with what I had in hand, I recently (well OK, 9 months ago) discovered a day-one bug in the OpenVMS Itanium primitives for self-relative queue manipulation. While I have the source listings, I found it far easier to explore what was happening using the "poor-man's microfiche" and ANALYZE/CRASH. I wrote an extensive blog on it. It was one of the last bugs that Clair Grant worked before he was made an OpenVMS Engineering outcast. :( Point is that with the right tool, you can figure out what's going on. In the days of the listings on fiche, I found it often much easier to look at the code in SDA than to lug about the fiche reader and ruin my eyesight. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.