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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

It's a good thing we're buddies again because this line of defense was 
getting nowhere.  It was having about the same impact as holding up a 
bulb of garlic or a crucifix.  For one thing, I'm not fundamentally a 
whiner, as anyone can tell.  But even more critical, the post I 
originally reacted to could itself be interpreted as whining.  I've been 
known to whine myself occasionally about fat lazy bastards sucking up 
welfare.

It bothers me a little that you stated, as you have to others, that it 
was unconditionally considered whining to react negatively to rudeness 
or insensitivity.  I guess everyone has his own opinion, but this is 
hardly the way to win friends and influence people.

You were going to seize upon my travails with the compiler as tenuous 
evidence of my blackheartedness?  Please, many installations where I've 
worked or taught have signs on the wall saying that you never blame the 
compiler.  It's in the first chapter of most programming texts.  I have 
no doubt that it works great, although it comes with a disclaimer saying 
it's not guaranteed to be free of bugs.  I'm sure they were able to hire 
many, many Taiwanese to help perfect it.

What bothers me is that if a person who wasn't already an expert 
programmer were to buy this compiler, in most cases they wouldn't be 
able to make it do jack.  That's not true of the only other compiler I 
ever bought for a microcomputer, the Think Pascal compiler for 
MacIntosh.  It was frustrating in some ways, and only offered one 
graphics window and one text window (actually I'm not really sure of 
that), but when you used "readln" in a program it stopped and waited for 
input from the keyboard, opening a text window to echo back the input.  
With this BS, it's clear to me that no one necessarily wants you to 
learn how to do that.  How would that encourage people to buy software?  
But, as a person who has met or exceeded every intellectual challenge 
ever posed to him, I have no doubt that my lover will figure out how to 
do it and then teach me!  We just need to buy an (n+1)th manual.

Bill