On 15.03.2024 23:40, David Crayford wrote:
REXX can indeed be quite tricky to navigate. I recently conducted a session titled
"Python for REXX programmers" at work, and during the preparation, I was
surprised (although not entirely) by the numerous traps and pitfalls inherent in REXX.
There are no "numerous pitfalls inherent in REXX", it therefore is a form of badmouthing that I
would expect from a religious language warrior, not from a sorber software engineer.
When you add to this its absence of basic functionalities like sorting lists,
it begs the question: Why opt for REXX when we have a plethora of alternatives
available today?
The first has nothing to do with the second. Anyone who needs sorting capabitites of lists can do so
in Rexx.
For a professional software engineer it is mandatory that he knows more than one programming
language if he wishes to be able to solve problems adequately.
The obvious answer may be familiarity, but in our industry, this argument seems
rather weak unless you're confined to a limited environment. After all, I
wouldn't want to revert to using a 1990s-era flip-top phone, let alone a rotary
dial from the 1970s.
The obvious answer would rather be that there is a plethora of Rexx that has been developed over the
decades that reliably and efficiently solves problems. From a business administration point of view
it would be quite stupid to forgo well tested and working software.
---rony
On 16 Mar 2024, at 2:47 am, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, that explains a mystery. I did not realize that SIGNAL ON was pushed and
popped on subroutine calls. I have had this vague problem where my SIGNAL ON
NOVALUE did not seem to work but at the time of an error it is always easier to
fix the NOVALUE condition than troubleshoot the SIGNAL ON.
Thanks!
Charles
On Thu, 14 Mar 2024 12:04:00 -0500, Glenn Knickerbocker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:01:30 -0500, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
And the answer is ... "The three numeric settings are automatically saved across
internal and external subroutine and function calls."
I was setting numeric digits in an initialization subroutine, so Rexx helpfully
unset it on return from initialization. I thought I had done it that way before
but I guess I have not.
Funny, I work with a lot of code that has a common subroutine for retrieving a
TRACE setting to set in the main routine, and I never even thought about why,
or about all the stuff that gets saved across calls! From CALL HELPREXX on VM:
The status of DO loops and other structures:
--though, importantly, not the *indices* of the loops!
Trace action:
NUMERIC settings:
ADDRESS settings:
Condition traps: (CALL ON and SIGNAL ON)
Condition information:
Elapsed-time clocks:
--
--
__________________________________________________________________________________
Prof. Dr. Rony G. Flatscher
Department Wirtschaftsinformatik und Operations Management
Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik und Gesellschaft
D2c 2.086
WU Wien
Welthandelsplatz 1
A-1020 Wien/Vienna, Austria/Europe
http://www.wu.ac.at
__________________________________________________________________________________
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