On Wednesday, 08/23/2006 at 10:58 AST, Charles Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Isn't there kind of a fundamental logical schizophrenia in Rexx in that you > can have a program in which FOO is not a variable, yet SAY FOO is a valid > instruction.
Your logic fails when you say "FOO is not a variable". Since there aren't any declaratory statements in REXX, FOO is *always* a variable. The variable can be either set or unset. > Similarly > > BAR. = "X" > SAY BAR.17 > > outputs a value of "X" yet one would expect that an enumeration of BAR. > would not "find" BAR.17 Well, except that BAR. = "X" sets all possible combinations of BAR.tail to "X". I would be very upset if REXX did not "find" BAR.17 after I explicitly told it that BAR.anything is "X". And there is no concept of an "enumeration of BAR." since for all practical purposes BAR. has an infinite number of tails. > Rexx is kind of schizophrenic on whether or not a particular variable > "exists." Yes, I know, the documentation may be precise, but the philosophy > is still somewhat schizophrenic, IMHO. I don't get the schizophrenic part, but I do understand that not everyone likes the way the REXX language was defined to work, particularly as it applies to unset variables. Programmers who are initmately familiar with other procedural languages get stung from time to time by REXX. Users (the people who used the VM system to solve business problems and for whom REXX was created) were very happy with it since they didn't bring preconceptions to the table. For their simple-enough programs (scripts, really), REXX worked flawlessly without the need to worry about numbers vs. strings and variables vs. literals. Their worst nightmare was converting their old EXEC and EXEC2 scripts to REXX. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
