At 09:30 PM 5/20/00 -0400, Ann Harrison wrote:

>Anyone know why this call was dropped? Anyone want
>to defend that decision?
>

The original DSRI/OSRI philosophy was there the entire API is documented:
There are no private back doors. There were two reasons for this.
First, all database utilities should be considered optional -- anything
that a utility can do should be documented and available to an application
program. Second, it keeps developers honest. Thing that are not
sufficiently well thought out or tested to be exposed to users should
not be in the product at all.

Open source makes this philosophy absolutely essential. When the
source is published, there are no back doors.



Jim Starkey