Conference thebay::joyoflex

    	Presumably if you did the same thing twice it would access
    violates?
    
    Def:-  Violate    ....  an unmapped memory address
    
    	Roses are red
    	Violates are blue,
    	Your programme is dead
    	And you're in a stew.

    DEC documentation has been using access violate as an active verb
    for at least five years that I can remember, maybe longer.
    
    --bonnie

    At first we had trouble your base-note reading.
    
    But it gets easier as I imaged you Spanish phrases transliterating to
    English. Now I can't myself stop! 

    "Access violating" is a back formation from a compound noun
    (access violation) used as a verb (to access violate).  It
    probably ought to be hyphenated.  
    
    But the base note doesn't illustrate back formation, does it? 
    It's changing the word order, but not changing the formation of
    the word.  
    
    --bonnie

    Those of us who routinely encounter "access violations" messages,
    (yes, I admit it!) take even more liberties with the language, and use 
    ACCVIO as the verb.  It's common to hear that a program ACCVIO'd at
    instruction whatever...
    
    -ellie

    I thought the correct grammar would be obvious to any phillectic.
    A program that violates access commits an access violation.
    A tailgater who rams a technical writer indirectly commits a
    grammar correction (corrects grammar by indirect means).
    Sheesh.

    Re: 887.5

    >Those of us who routinely encounter "access violations" messages...use
    >ACCVIO as the verb.
    
    And some of us use other terms...

    >But the base note doesn't illustrate back formation, does it? 
    
    So "DISJOINTED" (lacking order or coherence) has a
    back formation of "DISJOINT", 
    
    as in, 
    
    	'Da soivice in dis joint is gadawful.'
    

    You got it, Rick . . . 
    
    Spouse tells me that the wishbone, the wing-T, the full house, 
    and the shotgun are all examples of back formations . . .
    
    --bonnie

    I came across a note the other day in which the author described a
    program encountering an ACCVIO as having "stacked".  This presumably
    refers to the stack dump produced along with the error message.
    
    -dave

    Too bad we don't use cards any more.  'T's been a long time since
    I saw someone stacking the deck....

    re .10 and "stacked ACCVIOs":
    
    As a long-time VMS programmer, and someone who spent several years in
    the VMS executive, I'm an accomplished master of the accvio. :-) (Also,
    I prefer to type it in lower case as a common noun, pronounced
    "ACK-vee-oh.")
    
    I think what a "stacked ACCVIO" probably means is a condition handler
    that tries to correct for an accvio, and itself accvios. In bad cases
    of this, the handler catches its own condition, which then accvios
    again, causing it to try to handle the accvio, which --- I'm sure you
    get the idea.
    
    In this case, the accvios are indeed stacked on top of each other, not
    only conceptually, but also on the machine's program stack. The accvios
    continue to stack on top of each other until the stack runs out, and
    some other move serious error puts a stop to the whole scenario.
    
    	Jon

    where I'm from, we call them "rolling accvios" and I ate up a
    whole system that way once.
    
    --bonnie

    That was a mis-design.  If a handler is active for a particular
    kind of exception, it should not be re-entered for the same kind
    of exception; the exception should propagate immediately.
    I thought this was elementary stuff.
    
    Uh, wait a minute, in order to post this in this conference...
    OK.  If you have a procedure nested inside another procedure, and
    the inner one gets a recursive exception, then you should propagate
    the exception to the outer lexical level.  (If the one at the outer
    lexical level has a different handler, that is.)  New conference
    scheduled for opening soon at a node near you:  Joy of YACC.

    	The first machine to implement page faulting was in the days when
    real memory was *so* expensive, and the page fault handler was *so*
    complex that it had to be paged. They had a mini page fault handler
    that was specially tailored to page the real page fault handler and was
    only 3 pages long.
    
    	The first machine that was paged
    	is now excessively aged
    		at first it was fun
    		but now it's been done
    	it just gets disk builders enraged
    
    (oops, sorry, wrong note)

    re: .14
    
    Of course rolling accvios are a bug.  Does that mean you can't have
    a name for it? 
    
    --bonnie

    Of course not!  You can have things without names, and names without
    things, and names with things (or things with names).  I'm not sure
    about having nothing without a name, or maybe nothing usually has no
    name.

    There is a name for names without things:  vapourware.

    re: .17
    	For a long time vacuums existed before there was a name. Isn't that
    a nothing without a name?  What is the status of a goblin or hobbit
    before you invent the name for it? Is a vacuum somewhere where nothing
    exists except hobbits?

    .16's question was aimed at Mr. Diamond's crack in .14, about
    "elementary stuff," which appeared to imply that since I shouldn't
    have programmed such a lousy error handler (my first, by the way),
    I shouldn't refer to rolling accvios and dignify my incompetence
    with a name.
    
    --bonnie

    Another possibility for "rolling accvios" is "recursive accvios" which
    I have heard and which I found instantly understandable.

    This whole discussion is becoming recursively inscrutable.

    Re .20
    
    No, I was complaining that the VMS error signalling design has a bug.
    (Not a coding bug, a design bug.)  If a user's error handler is active
    for a certain kind of error, then the VMS error signalling code should
    not re-enter the same handler for the same kind of error.  The handler
    cannot reliably prevent recursion (it can unreliably attempt
    prevention), but the OS can do so reliably, and it would have been
    perfectly well structured to do so.
    
    Sorry there's no lex in this reply, but hopefully a bit of joy or
    comfort at least.

    	VMS does not have the design bug implied. If a user's error handler
    is active (regardless of the type of error) it will only be reinvoked
    recurisvely by VMS if it (or a routine it calls) explicitly re-declares 
    it as a signal handler before the next error occurs.
    
    	It is possible for a signal handler to re-declare itself, and it
    may even be valid. Recursion is a valid programming technique, and my
    mention of *the* original page fault handler may have been an early
    example. The only thing required is that there should be a correctly
    thought out termination condition for the recursion.
    
    	It is easy for a signal handler to be called twice. If it returns
    with a SS$_RESIGNAL status because it does not understand that type of
    problem, and a higher level handler decides to unwind, then it will be
    called again during the unwind so that it has a chance to back out the
    little bit of the machine status that it may understand. Without an
    explicitly recursive redeclaration (which is valid in some
    circumstances) it will never be called more than twice.
    
    	I suggest we take the rathole to VAXWRK::VMSNOTES. If technical
    writers learned something other than wordplay we could be out of a job
    ;-)
    
    	Dave    -- in an attempt to enrage *every* conference member.

  Dave,

  I sense a real opportunity in your .23 (perhaps even worthy of a poster).
  If JOYOFLEX is for wordplay, the recent discussion might be classified as 
  "byteplay" or (dare I say it?) "longword play."

  The obvious place for such a discussion would be a NOTESFILE called



  JOYOFHEX

  JP

    re: .22
    .
    .
    .
    Comfort and joy, comfort and joy, 
    Oh glad tidings of comfort and joy. . .
    
    oops, wrong season.
    
    --bonnie

    Re .23
    
    >If a user's error handler
    >is active (regardless of the type of error) it will only be reinvoked
    >recurisvely by VMS if it (or a routine it calls) explicitly re-declares 
    >it as a signal handler before the next error occurs.
    
    This might be good news.  Can a user's error hander re-declare itself
    as a handler for types of errors other than the ones it's presently
    handling, while leaving the ones it's presently handling to be sent
    upstream?  (Until the time it completes, after which new occurences of
    the handled errors can be attempted to be handled by the same handler.)
    
    >Recursion is a valid programming technique,
    
    Of course.  No one said it wasn't.  Recursion is valid, infinite
    recursion is invalid, loops are valid, infinite loops are invalid,
    etc.  In cases where the operating system knows that the recursion
    is expected to be infinite, it should act on that knowledge.
    
    Sorry to drift off-topic again.  My handler seems to have trouble
    correcting some iterative misunderstandings.

    A declared error handler is not declared to handle any particular type
    or error. It chooses when (and if) it is executed if it feels like
    handling the particular error that has occurred.
    
    It could make this decision based on the time of day, or a random
    number generator, or if enough pages are on the free list. These
    factors can also be a consideration in whether it chooses to redeclare
    itself. This is what makes it rather difficult for the operating system
    to decide whether the handler is spaced out in infinite recursion, or
    is just happening to use rather a lot of calls to itself before it
    decides what the optimal result is for a division by zero.
    
    I agree that this might be good news. In real life an entity has a
    range of problems it might be capable of handling, and some of these
    might be handled well one time and badly another. Maybe artificial
    intelligence should be based on a VMS error handler that includes a
    random number generator to help it decide if, when and how it should
    handle an error, and learns from its experience.
    
    All life is a mistake - it's just a question of how you handle it.

    (not that it's such a crime to rathole a moderately long-dormant string)
    
    Hmmm... a string on back-formations that doesn't include the string
    "kudo" ...  Hope I'm not ratholing the wrong string... :-)
    
    Anyhoo, I noticed a strange thing t'other day that could only be a
    back-formation, but I'm not able to think of other instances of this
    sort of strangeness.  Surely other conceptaholics will be able to
    dredge up more.
    
    My wife was given a very weird warm turtleneck sweater made out of some
    new hi-tech perspiration-wicking fabric, but the nature of the fabric
    is not what prompts this note.  No, I write because the sweater is an
    extremely garish blend of coppery purple, almost-fluorescent teal, and
    other indescribable but never-occurring-in-nature colors.  Even THAT
    isn't the total reason.  Thing is, that the sweater's pattern is
    indistinguishable from "cammie" -- that's right, army camouflage.  I
    figure that "cammie" is getting so popular these daze that it can be
    used as the basis for patterns, despite the fact that if she were to
    wear this into the forest, wild animals would stream away from her in
    droves.  Which is regrettable because she's normally of the sort around
    whose feet forest creatures tend to gather, Snow-White-style.
    
    Despite the syn�sthetic nature of this back-formation, I trust that it
    rings true to type.  Gentle readers, can you think of more?  (And no,
    USA tortured-metal  automobile styling of the '50s doesn't count.)
    

    There are two aspects to camouflage...
    
    The first is the 'randomised' pattern to break up the outline and shape
    inherent in the object.  Of course the randomising is not complete as
    it is oriented towards the habitat or environment -- so zebras are
    striped as they are in shadows cast by long grass; ships are 'blocked'
    for the bulky wave, etc.  Presumably your wife's sweater is patterned
    in the army fatigues type camouflage?  So from a 'shape' consideration
    it will be suitable for the greatest range of habitats.
    
    The second aspect to camouflage is the colour scheme that's used.  And
    here we see the use of medium blues and greys at sea, light blues and
    greys in the air, greens and browns etc.  It sounds as though the
    colours of your wife's sweater have been chosen for the sort of habitat
    found when shopping.
    
    For someone who is trying to merge into a crowd of shoppers it could be
    ideal.

    I have a camo pattern hat in which the predominant color is
    international safety orange.  I was told that deer are color-blind and
    hunters are not, yielding this dual-purpose hat.
    
    I usually tell people it's so deer won't shoot me.
    
    I notice that you say cammie and I say camo.
    

    Deer may or may not be colorblind.  For decades, the scientific wisdom
    was that cats are colorblind; only recently has it been proven that
    they are not.  Their color perception is in a range, much like our own,
    that overlaps ours toward the violet end such that they can see into
    the ultraviolet but not into the red.  Maybe deer have color
    perception, too.
    
    Which brings up the point of garish colors in camo pattern - clearly,
    as suggested, this pattern is aimed at its wearer's being able to blend
    into a rack of bright silk hankies to avoid spousal detection.

    Interesting about wives blending into the mallscape...  Might work, at
    that!
    
    Anent fluorescent "camo" (see how fast I learn the lingo) & deer
    putatively being colorblind...  But what of other forest creatures
    whose alarm-reactions might tip off the monochromat-Bambis to your
    presence?  Or worse, what if the BLUEJAYS are armed, even if the deer
    aren't?  Bears thinking about...
    
    Or the bears too, for that matter...  You know their long-standing
    obsession about being armed, claiming it's written in the US
    Constitution.  At least the domestic bears.  Following this ineluctable
    logic to its conclusion:  You & your dumb hat might be safer outside of
    the US border.  Hope this helps...
                                      
    :-)  
    

    
    The latest I've read on deer color perception is that they cannot
    distinguish between pale green and hunter orange.
    
    Regarding camoflage, has anyone had any experience with the approach
    used on some WWI ships? (It might have been called "dazzle" paint and
    then again I may be misremembering that.) It's hard to believe those
    huge b&w stripes and blobs could do anything but make a ship more
    conspicuous, but eyewitnesses say otherwise...
    
    JP

    John,
    
    Yes, "dazzle" camoflage was used on ships -- but I think in the Great
    Wa--- World War I, and it really worked (as did some other bizarre
    techniques, like covering the object you wanted to hide with bright
    lights).  It was part of a "Nova" episode on camoflage.
    
    							Ann B.

    I think that cats can see red and/or infrared.  When I took a photo
    using a flash with red/infrared AF assist light, the cats jumped when
    that light came on.  The flash itself didn't bother them though :-)
    
    I've heard that bees can see UV.
    
    And I don't know what colors ratholes can see, but someone who
    probably doesn't know any Greek once offered me a congratulation.
    Probably for getting an average score on a bridge hand.
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    There's a wonderful book called The War Magician in which the British
    stage magician <Mumble> Maskelyne is engaged to do combat camouflage
    and comes up with some really brilliant stuff, including building a
    fake port of Alexandria and hiding the real one so the Axis bombed the
    fake on.  He also hid some installations by filling all the area in
    them and around them with flashing dazzling lights.  You can also hide
    something on the horizon by putting bright lights in front of it.
    
    While we're at it, the US Army in WWII assigned openly gay soldiers to
    camouflage units on the theory that they were more artistic.
    
    The WWI dazzle painting didn't hide the ships, but it broke up their
    silouettes so they couldn't be seen clearly.
    

    The point of dazzle camouflage on a ship is not to make the ship
    difficult to see in the sense that we usually understand visual
    difficulty; hiding isn't the intention.  Dazzle camo breaks up the
    ship's outline, causing some parts of the ship not to register
    visually, and the parts that do register to register as being in the
    wrong places or of the wrong shape to be a ship.  The observer's mind
    does actually become confused to the degree that he or she will report
    no ships, lots more ships, bigger ships, smaller ships, almost anything
    except the actual number of the actual-sized ships.
    
    Dazzle camo fell out of favor when techniques such as radar and
    infrared illumination became available, because the paints cannot hide
    a ship's radar or IR signature.  Today's radar-absorbent materials,
    combined with radar corners, could be used to achieve the dazzle effect
    for radar.  But antiship missiles' guidance computers are capable of
    integrating what the radar sees sufficiently to generate a meaningful
    outline.

    Camouflage, especially dazzle camouflage, is also intended to disrupt
    the observer's ability to judge the distance to the target.

    G'day,
    
    re -.2
    
    from the Goon Shows...
    
    
    Time 1942....
    
    Here is the news. Last night, the Royal Navy towed a cardboard replica
    of the British Isles into the North Sea. The Germans retalliated by
    bombing it with cardboard replica bopmbs....
    
    
    
    djw
    What goes now you see me now you don't?
    
    
    
    
    
    
    a zebra walking across a  (english b&w striped) ped xing...(aka a zebra
    crossing)
    
    [for the benefit of non travelling ex-colonials ;-)

    Spike Milligan, progenitor of the Goon Show, was in North Africa
    getting shot at when these camo/magic extravaganzas were executed.
    

    ... with fake blindfolds & bullets -- and a candy last ciggie, one
                                                                     assumes...

I heard a BBC correspondent use "oppositionist" to mean "a member of the
opposition" a.k.a. "opponent" this morning as I was driving in to work.

That got me to thinking whether any other words that fit the same pattern were
being subjected to the same fate.

opposition/opponent/oppose

Here are those members of the same family that I could think of:

composition/component/compose
proposition/proponent/propose
exposition/exponent/expose

There were a lot that I found in my Digital standard issue American Heritage
Dictionary which were only partially represented:

position/[ponent]/"pose", posit

apposition/[apponent]/appose
deposition/[deponent]/depose, deposit
imposition/[imponent]/impose, impone (obs.)
[interposition]/[interponent]/interpose
preposition/[preponent]/[prepose]
postposition/[postponent]/[postpose], postpone
reposition/[reponent]/repose, reposit
supposition/[supponent]/suppose
transposition/[transponent]/transpose

There are a lot of peculiarities about how these words and their derivatives are
used. For example, pose should not be listed with position since pose in the
sense of "to strike a pose" is derived from Lat. pausa, at least according to
the AHD, while pose as in "to ask or challenge" derives indirectly from oppose.

Another interesting example is that while postpose isn't used, postpone is.

At any rate, since opposition is the only word that regularly describes a group
of people, it seems to be the only one capable of or vulnerable to the "-ist"
back formation. Proponent is a person or group along the same lines as opponent,
but proposition doesn't denote those in favor of something, so is unlikely to
run into the same misfortune.

I assume that there are other words derived from Lat. ponere which I haven't
listed here. I leave it to others to comment on them if they are so inclined.

It was an interesting exercise.

Wook

    Wow, I didn't know there were so many possible positions.
    
    Now, did you dispose of one or did you forget to dispose of it?

Oops, well, I guess disposition was a disponent in .42 though not intentionally.

Or should that be a disponent of .42?

That which is disposed of or that from which it is disposed?

Wook

    The disponent was indisposed.
    
    Incidentally, why is there transpose but no cispose or parapose?
    
    Why aren't impose and expose opposites?
    Or compose and propose?
    Pose and depose, pose and dispose, pose and impose, pose and repose,
    OK, enough.
    Let us show the spirit of Edgar Allan, Pose and Propriety.

    Re .45
    
    > Why aren't impose and expose opposites?
    
    Because impose means to place into/onto - the Latin preposition in,
    when used in this fashion, means into or onto, not the static condition
    of being in or on.  Expose means to place out of [secrecy/hiding/
    obscurity].
    
    Compose means to place with, and propose means to place
    for/unto/forward.
    
    Pose means to place or position, depose means to place down/out.  Dispose
    means to remove from place.  Repose means to place back/backward, as in
    to lean back and relax, not to place again.
    
    They all make proper etymological sense.  Okay?  :-)

>    They all make proper etymological sense.  Okay?  :-)
        
        I suppose.
        
        Dan

Juxtaposition

Sheesh, just when you though it was safe to go back to the topic.