Re: [MacPerl] Is this a bug?

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 10:53 -0800 2/23/97, Brian L. Matthews wrote:
>Paul J. Schinder writes:
>|Can someone please tell me why people automatically think there is
>|something wrong with MacPerl rather than with their script?
>
>Unfortunately, it's not limited to MacPerl. There's always someone in
>comp.lang.perl.misc who thinks because his or her script doesn't work,
>it must be a bug in perl, even when about a minute with the
>documentation would have demonstrated otherwise.

Nor is it limited to perl.  I've seen it as far back as FAP (Fortran
Assembly Program), the useable IBM 704 assembler (it even had a readable
manual, unheard of for the 1950s-period IBM...this manual was written at
UCLA).  Nor is it limited to compilers/assemblers...an amazing number of
machine bugs over the years have been fixed by correcting "perfect"
software.

I developed, several places, a good reputation for not crying wolf about
the hardware...good enough that when I called one of the Librascope
engineers (one of the brightest guys in both hardware and software I've
known) to report a clearly-impossible error, he said "it can't do
that...let me think about it".

Half an hour later, he called back, and said "Have your CE replace resistor
Rnn on board xx with 27K instead of [whatever was there]".  Problem solved.
And field mod circulated to all sites with that machine (RPC 9000).

   --John

   "If you look in gear box number 3, you will find a dead rat."
      --Norbert Weiner, referring to a troublesome early RADAR set