You may be a very reasonable man, but PL/1 was a reasonable programming language^*. Would you want to spend time with it? The point is that you've made many individual reasonable assumptions, but the whole is not better than the parts. You have taken your reasonable assumptions and corrupted the logic to come up with something faulty.

What's worse, you have embarrassed a member in good standing in this community while doing this, and brought shame to perlmonks for having such a pointless discussion.

Please do not reply to this post, I will not make any further points. I will not cast a -- vote on your post, because I feel it has received enough bad attention already. Next time you feel inclined to share something with the community that seems broken, remember: "select is broken".

Anonymous Monk

^* In PL/1, if you tried to say "25 + 1 / 3", the result was 5.333...; not 25.333. This was because of many "reasonable assumptions" the programmer's made in the logic of PL/1.