I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you about regular expressions John. I have been in the mainframe programming business since 1971 and as my experience and skills increased along the way, regular expressions and their *judicious* use became and remain a basic part of my work tool kit. Since not too long after I managed to buy my first IBM-compatible personal computer, I have often used and continue to use the awk scripting language, whose entire raison d'etre is based on regular expression analysis of text, to help me help my employer get our job done and keep the customers satisfied.
I admit I'm not a fan of perl, so PCRE might not appeal to me per se, but perl has strengths that awk does not, including full support for the UTF encoding of text, which is becoming more and more crucial in the multi-national, multi-language world that is business today. No one is forcing regular expressions or the tools which support them down your or anyone's throat. These are tools to be used *where appropriate* to make your job easier and to permit (semi-)automated analysis of text files that would not always be practical using procedural language features. If you find regular expressions obtuse or un-helpful, then you are free to use what works best for you. The perl fans have an acronym for that which is appropriate here: TMTOWTDI, short for "There's More Than One Way To Do It". Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Walker Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:10 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: ASSEMBLER-LIST Digest - 22 Mar 2014 to 24 Mar 2014 (#2014-54) This comment of pc'ish arrogance re reg expressions deserves to be rebuked strongly. Honestly, I have used minimal regular expressions and found it to be obtuse, arcane obfuscation that is valued because it's the only text handling capability that Unix-land values. Ooh, YOU are smart enough to do it, and any SMART programmers should know how to use it. What a load of bull. It is awful to read and it does NOT need to be that way. The forward slashes and back slashes all over the place is crap and ought not to be forced down ANYONE'S throats. What a load of rubbish. I will NOT be polite about it. And your arrogance re the mainframe about it dieing. That's crap from pc-land, which is utterly a self-fulfilling prophecy, which sadly, due to management buy in to the lie, will eventually be done. Right now, mainframe is a living, viable, important resource for any large company. From the start, the advent of pc clusters has radically increased the cost infrastructure of all large companies. It sucks, and is only NOW starting to imitate what the mainframe did 60 years ago. Ooh, you are imitating the dinosaur. Nice. So, you prove the dinosaur was valuable after all, thus contradicting your own argument that is a useless thing. Bravo. Typical pc hypocrisy. -------------------------------------------- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system.
