Hello David!

Thursday August 15 1996 from David Noon 2:440/4 to Harry Bush:

 DN> Whipping off a few of the latest release would be too small a
 DN> job for IBM.

Yeah... perhaps IBM should leave production of small series simply
to distributors, provided that they use authorized PGP-signed file
sets (therefore guaranteed against unauhorized patches).  Oh yes,
that would be psychologically hard... - I just remembered how I tried
to convince somebody to issue _signed_ fixpaks so that people would
know if they have unforged issue downloaded over the Net.  I wasn't
very successful in bringing public key cryptography back to IBM...

Some very serious organizations are not so shy to use PGP.  For example
CIAC (Computer Incident Advisory Capability at The U.S. Department of
Energy) issues all it's public warnings PGP-signed.  Legal harrassment
to Phil Zimmermann, author of PGP, has also ended so there really
shouldn't be any obstacles...

 HB>> Hell, even Indelible Blue didn't have PL/I for OS/2 for sale

 DN> A product manager at IBM released the PL/I compiler as a hardware
 DN> device, so it wasn't offered to software resellers.

Wow! Maybe they sometimes release vice versa some real hardware as
software too? ;-))))

 DN> I sometimes wish I were dumb enough to be a product manager. I'd make
 DN> more money, get to go on trips to all the best customer sites, not
 DN> have to worry about quality of code, ...

Yeah. For example, you could just visit me in Riga (nice town, great
seaside, good beer etc. ;-)  and try to convince me to buy PL/I.  After
a week of good-spent time, you probably might be successful... :))))

Some questions regarding your other msg:

 > allows enumerations. It has even more options fo DO-loops (UPTHRU and
 > DOWNTHRU as semantically different alternatives to TO ... BY ...).
 > It permits type-associated pointers, as well as free-standing pointers.

 > It now supports object class definitions, but IBM has not yet
 > documented the statements. Peter Elderon simply mentioned on Compuserve
 > something like "We've implemented full OOP in the new
release" and left
 > it at that. Just a minor re-architecting of the language.

What version are you speaking about - new 1.2?  Is it available already?

Best wishes,                                   Harry
                              Saturday August 17 1996 11:40
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