Perhaps I shouldn't comment further. I don't want to ignite a religious war ... but perhaps it'll be safe enough to concur that yes, you certainly can do a lot more with pipe (and quite elegantly) , but sometimes (and I think this is one of those cases) the code you need to accomplish it is anything but obvious, even to someone like me who's been using pipes for nearly a decade (admittedly without a deep understanding of the innards, but even so some of my pipelines are wondrous to behold, at least to me ;-). Oh, and if what you say were strictly the case, would we really have a SPACE stage? Wasn't that done to make it easier to accomplish something that could be accomplished with a similar set of somewhat-less-obvious stages? Where/how do you draw the line?
On 10/11/07, Rob van der Heij <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 10/11/07, Bob Cronin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > PMFJI but is all this complexity for such a relatively simple function > worth > > it? Kinda cries out for a built-in stage if you ask me. Rexx has both > Pos > > and Wordpos ... ;-) > > A screwdriver is more complicated to use than a hammer because you > have to learn which way to turn it to tighten the screw, and you may > need a different type of screwdriver for different type of screws. For > some of the things you can do with the screwdriver, the hammer would > do too. > > For very simple things, the REXX built-in functions sometimes do what > you want. But beyond that, a REXX program will take more to do the > job. > > With 3 stages I can select records that contain a particular word, > where 1 wordpos( ) call could do (when you remember the order of > operands). If you want to remove separators like comma or brackets, > it's 4 stages - versus 2 built-in REXX functions. But when you want to > select records that contain one or more words from a set, it's 6 > stages in CMS PIpelines, but needs a loop and extra programming in > REXX. To me that's where the break-even was. If you always have simple > problems, continue to use REXX. > > I don't think we really need a new stage when you can achieve the same > with 3 built-in stages and no heavy extra cost. Once you master an > idiom like predselect, you can also use all other criteria to select > records. Like all records that have a word where the 2nd character of > the word was "a" Or the records that have a palindrome in them (I feel > a challenge coming). > > Rob >
