Some years ago I tried to write - well, I did write - a routine that parses a string into various components, able to work with pairs of single and double quotes, parens and '/*-*/'. I haven't looked at it in a while, but I'm pretty sure it doesn’t know what to do with embedded delimiters; if the first such string it finds is a left paren, it simply goes to the next right paren and returns the string in between. To handle embedded markers it needs to be recursive, which isn't TOO hard but so far I've never desperately needed it; if I ever fix it to work it'll just be for the challenge and the fun of it.
...Unless, of course, someone wants to pay me to do it, but in that case someone else will beat me to it, and it'll probably be a better product than mine. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* The kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning; it is for the desperate. -James Denney (1856-1917) */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Monday, May 1, 2023 23:52 It's the curse of the TRT instruction. It's a great hammer; performs great; but everything has to look like a nail. No good for recursive descent for something such as "trace I; say ((3+4)*5+6)*7". And I can't forgive that there's no way to escape the command separator, ";". (That's largely bad layering in the design. I will be told, "Just pick a character you won't use!" There is almost none such. Sometimes I set it to "¾". But it would be better to have it when I need it and quote it when I don't. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
