On Fri, 4 Sep 2020 10:55:19 -0500, Steve Smith wrote:
>I'm not a PL/I novice, if not an expert. Whatever you read, it does not
>mean what you think it means.
>
Enterprise PL/I for z/OS Language Reference
Version 5 Release 1 IBM SC27-8940-00
Datatypes and attributes. . . 17
If the number 3.1416 is used in more than one place in the program,
or if it requires specific data or precision attributes, you must declare
it as a named constant. Thus, the above statement can be coded
as follows:
dcl Pi FIXED DECIMAL (5,4) VALUE(3.1416);
area = (radius**2) * Pi;
Perhaps then it doesn't mean what it says. I take "must" to indicate
a rule, not a suggestion. I haven't seen the rule. I haven't looked
very hard. Does it apply alike to 3.1416, 2.7183, and 2?
>A constant (or variable) named TWO is an abomination in any language.
>
Yes.
-----------------------------------------------
I see everything twice:
On Fri, 4 Sep 2020 19:05:32 +0000, Robert Prins wrote:
On Fri, 4 Sep 2020 19:06:49 +0000, Robert Prins wrote:
> ...
>And I don't think that anyone in their right mind would ever use anything like
>your SQRT(X**TWO + Y**TWO). We once had a contractor who would use TRUE and
>FALSE rather than just '1'b and '0'b, and did his compares as
>
>select(var_a = var_b);
> when(true) ...
> when(false) ...
>end;
>
Shouldn't that just be IF ... THEN ... ELSE?
>He didn't last very long!
>
I feel FALSE and TRUE should be compiler intrinsics even though
they are rarely useful. But I'm a Pascal partisan.
In Rexx I have sometimes, perhaps mischievously, replaced:
IF (var_a = var_b) THEN
THEN temp_var = some_string
ELSE tenp_var = ''
say string_a || temp_var || string_b
with:
say string_a || copies( some_string, (var_a = var_b) )string_b
to save a few lines of code.
-- gil
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