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Re: Anybody any idea on how to set back a revision number?
From: |
Lee Sau Dan |
Subject: |
Re: Anybody any idea on how to set back a revision number? |
Date: |
31 Oct 2001 08:46:47 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.090003 (Oort Gnus v0.03) Emacs/20.7 |
>>>>> "Philip" == Philip Lijnzaad <address@hidden> writes:
Philip> Oops, wrong. You also have to change pretty much all the
Philip> lines that contain just the revision number ('3.x' in your
Philip> case) to 2.x, and you also have to change all the lines
Philip> that look like ``next 3.x;'' to ``next 2.x;''.
Philip> In all likelihood, it is not worth the trouble, so the
Philip> short answer to your question is still: don't do it, it's
Philip> mostly pointless. Cheers,
I remember that back in the old days of BASIC of Apple ][ (i.e. BASIC
with the line numbers), there were utilities called "renum" or
"renumber". I think GWBASIC has it, too. These "renumber" utilities
can renumber the lines of the programs, modifying the cross references
(GOTO, GOSUB) as well.
Maybe, somebody would like to use his free time to hack out a
Perl/shell script to renumber CVS/RCS numbers. The most tricky part
would be cross-references, either from within a single ,v file
(e.g. RCS control info, $Id$ lines), or from other files (e.g. tags).
Background: BASIC programs in the old days have mandatory line number
in front of each statement (more precisely line). I was told this was
to prevent chaos and the necessity to sort a pile of _punch cards_
after dropping them onto the floor. Anyway, these numbers also served
as labels for the branch instructions -- GOTO and GOSUB. People
usually do not assign line numbers consecutively. They like to assign
it in multiples of 10. So, "10", "20", ... This is to make room to
insert lines into the middle of an existing program, using numbers
like "15", "25". The computer will always interpret a BASIC program
in the order of line numbers. But then, after some maintenance, a
BASIC program would be full of line numbers that end with "5", "2",
"3", etc. and it may become difficult to find more room in the line
number space to insert new lines. Having such lines also makes the
program look not neat. So, people invented the "renumber" utilities
to "prettify" the line numbers.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦(Big5) address@hidden(HZ)
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| e-mail: address@hidden http://www.csis.hku.hk/~sdlee |
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