I fear the discussion goes beyond what the IBMVM folks care about ...

On 27 November 2017 at 23:54, Davis, Larry (National VM Capability) <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes, I agree that it is a Literal
>
> But, it Starts with a Specific String “ ’PIPE “
>
> And, it uses Continuation Characters to group it in to a single statement
> ending with a quote and no continuation or Quote, a comma, and a blank line
>
>
>
> ‘PIPE  … ‘,
>
> … ‘,
>
> … ‘,
>
> … ‘,
>
> Blank Line
>
>
>

I see what you mean, and if it were just that, you could imagine a syntax
parser that actually looks inside the strings to identify the various
aspects of the syntax like label, stage, connector etc. Similar things are
done by syntax editors for C that look inside the format string and tell
you the parameters don't match.You could imagine that the editor finds the
place where the label is defined, or finds the "pad" stage in your pipeline
without tripping over a "pad" option in a "spec" stage.

But in many REXX programs, the pipeline is constructed by substitution of
REXX variables (or functions) that eventually make up the string that is
issued as a PIPE command. I wonder whether the simpler pure PIPE commands
are complicated enough that you'd benefit from a syntax aware-editor for
just those cases. When I was working on my web-based animation of a
pipeline, I quickly realized that the more interesting cases are not only
constructed by REXX programs, but actually are created by the pipeline
while it is running (for example the "unpack" that decides to change the
topology based on the data flowing through the pipeline).

Maybe we need a different type of editor to compose our pipelines such that
you tell the editor what you're doing rather than have a syntax parser
trying to figure out after you wrote it. I was looking at things like
Node-RED which contains an editor for data flow programming. You could take
the internal format of such a program to create the pipeline to sit in your
REXX routine. Unfortunately the programming concepts for Node-RED still
seem rather trivial in comparison to what we do with CMS Pipelines.

Sir Rob the Plumber

Reply via email to