On Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:55:12 -0400, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>
>The way REXX handles bare words and implicit concatenation makes it
>much more concise and much more readable for scripting. OTOH, it's
>parsing facilities are minimal.
>
Absolutely true about implicit concatenation (and POSIX shell is somewhat
similar.) But some managers or clients have insisted that I code
"'foo ' || bar" rather than "'foo' bar" because the former doesn't agree
with what they're accustomed to. ("You can code FORTRAN in any language.")
But the bare word handling is treacherous, especially in compound tails
when a prior assignment to a tail component may have occurred. It
would be precious if Rexx supported expressions in compound tails,
such as:
stem.['FooBar']
so I shouldn't be forced rather to code:
tail = 'FooBar'; stem.tail
But the Rexxperts (MFC?) deprecate the idea because:
o Rexx is too functionally stabilized for such a new construct. (But
what about OORexx?)
o There's no lexical elbow room to introduce such new syntax.
o It would add overhead to recognition of syntactic primaries and
assignment statements, with unacceptable performance impact.
On Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:56:33 -0400, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>
>>To be honest, the 'if then do' logic is very PL/1 like
>
>Sure, as is the select statement. But exiting from loops is very
>different.
>
You mean PL/1 doesn't provide "iterate INDEX" and "leave INDEX"?
Pity. (I don't know PL/1.)
-- gil
>--
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
> Atid/2 <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>
>We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
>(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
>
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