RE: What counts as technically slick?

These are my sentiments exactly!  I one thought out and designed a
whole system for calling a seperate "library of functions" to access
a file, and in the end came to the conclusion that this wouldn't buy
me ANYTHING but complexity.  

The externally defined files ALREADY provide you with as much of a
layer of independence from I/O operations as these external routines
do!

I guess I could see doing this if I thought the files would soon be
located on another computer, on another platform, where I'd save the
work of re-writing all of the programs involved.   But how often does
something like this ever happen?   It never has, for me.



On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, York, Albert wrote:

> On the surface it seems like a good idea, but what have you gained? 
> 
> I still have to define the record in my program, so if the file changes I
> still have to change all the programs that use that file. 
> 
> Also, if I do the READ in my program, it's obvious what I am doing, and
> error handling is pretty straight forward. If I call a separate program
> which does the READ, what have I gained? I have all the overhead of a
> program call and no clear advantage, that I can see. All you're doing is
> adding one more layer of complexity.
> 
> The only place where a program like this would be useful is if it is called
> from a CL program.
> 
> Albert York   
> 

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