Make up your mind Wayne. It's was only a couple of weeks ago you sent me email 
praising COBOL!

On 03/08/2013, at 8:17 AM, Wayne Bickerdike <[email protected]> wrote:

> Aww, it was getting interesting. Not been the same since the days of
> Ali and Frazier.
> 
> Personally, I wish C had never seen the light of day and PL/I had the
> place of COBOL.
> 
> On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 4:06 AM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I don't think you are really interested in how a qsort-like procedure
>> is implemented in PL/I, and I am not at all open-minded about the
>> relative merits of C and PL/I.
>> 
>> I do, however, want to make one final comment on your last post.
>> Compile-time binding is not a 'trick'.  It is preferable to
>> execution-time binding when it meets the requirements of a situation.
>> 
>> That said, our differences are visceral, not intellectual; further
>> exchanges between us will not clarify any issue; they would only
>> produce more acrimony.  I shall try to avoid you here on IBM-MAIN, but
>> that may not always be possible if we both contribute to a thread.  I
>> have put you on my kill list so that I will not see your posts unless
>> they are part of a thread to which I have already contributed or
>> quoted by someone else; and that should help.
>> 
>> Good luck!
>> 
>> On 8/2/13, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On 2/08/2013 11:47 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
>>>> As it happens a PL/I generic statement can distinguish the two sorting
>>>> schemes in the example you cite very readily.  The first has two
>>>> arguments, the second three, so that, simplistically,
>>>> 
>>>> declare generic_sort generic(sort1 when(*,*), sort2 when(*,*,*)) ;
>>>> 
>>>> does the job at compile time.  (It can be done at execution time too,
>>>> but this is not the place for an explication of how.)
>>> 
>>> I'm not interested in compile time tricks. How would you code the
>>> equivilent of the C qsort() function in PL/I?
>>> Does the PL/I runtime even have such a function?
>>> 
>>>> Your catholic taste in statement-level languages is admirable, much
>>>> less parochial than mine:  I have never been able to include COBOL
>>>> among the languages I approve.  I have, for my sins, had to confront a
>>>> good deal of it; but close acquaintance has not made me fonder of it.
>>>> What must be conceded is that the post-CODASYL language is improving.
>>>> It is useful to have substrings even if one must call them reference
>>>> modifications.
>>> 
>>> I made good money coding COBOL in the 90s so I approve of it. I write
>>> code to put food on the table not for religious reasons.
>>> I would rather be employed writing code in a language I dislike instead
>>> of unemployed coding for fun. The more languages I
>>> can master the more strings to my bow. Adaptability is important in the
>>> software industry.
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
>>>> 
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>> 
>> --
>> John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Wayne V. Bickerdike
> 
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