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Date:Mon Jan 19 11:29:24 1994 
Subject:Re: Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon 
From:"A.Sloman" 
Volume-ID:940119.04 

> >     3)      Thou shalt not use -goto-, & -go_on- since they are the most
> >             evil of constructs (unless you really want to of course :-)

goto is rather good for implementing finite state machines, provided it
is used with discipline. There are other options of course. Some say
the good lord implemented the universe as a finite state machine.
Computable anyway. (I don't believe it.)

> Actually, the most evil of Pop11 constructs is -valof-.  However, that
> prince of misdemeanors quails at the thunderous belches of the vertiable
> aristocrat of obscenities the X-toolkit.

I like using valof to postpone autoloading till needed, e.g. mapping
a VED key sequence to the name of a procedure rather than the procedure,
or writing code of the form
	valof("foo")(x,y,z)
to postpone autoloading of foo till needed (which may be never in some
cases). It's a bit like making lots of promises to be good and hoping
the circumstances will never arise, but framing your promises so as to
limit the damage.

Of course if you use sections a lot you have to be careful about such
things.

> >     4)      As you take from the stack, so must you give.
>
> Surely "as you give to the stack so must you take".  I tried writing
>       erase(); 99;
> as recommended by the tablets and (on my computer) ended up with Pop11
> going belly up.

Just a syntactic slip:
     4)      As you take from the stack, so must you have given.

These interesting tenses are dropping out of the language, alas. (I mean
English. I'd like to add them to Pop11 one day. Like "come_from").

> ...Mind you, once you've done %x Pop11 has a tendency to
> go belly up anyway.  To be honest, once you've started the X-server
> you're in big trouble.

Interesting. I think X is awful to program, but it does seem to work
round here. And I've even bitten the bullet and started using XVed, and
learnt that as long as I turn off menu-bars and the like (i.e. use
vanilla XVed), it's now actually quite robust (V14.2), and I've even
found out how to make my output.p window always appear in a particular
location and size, well suited to the profanities that appear therein.
The lack of menu bar does not bother me, as I have my own menu system
anyway, based on a subset of LIB PROPSHEET which also seems to work
quite robustly. Could it be that you have a buggy X server? Do not
worship false X implementations.

> >     9)      Thou shalt not worship false editors, VED is the one true
> >             editor.
>
> (mumble)
Actually, it's no longer ONE editor. As for truth, that's in vino. What
was it Pontius Pilate said?

Aaron