On Fri, 11 May 2018 10:41:37 -0500, Kirk Wolf wrote:
>
>I recognize that many here have learned it really well and don't have to
>think about all of the pitfalls and landmines. But please don't try to
>tell new mainframers who have learned modern scripting languages how nice
>it is :-)
>
>The good:
>
>- it is on every z/OS system, and it has a good set of system interfaces
>("environments")
>- it does have case-sensitive variable names, which maybe some people don't
>like ;-)
>
Sort of, or inconsistently. Simple symbols are case-insensitive; derived names
or compound symbols are case-sensitive.
>
>The bad:
>
>- a single data type (string)
>- limited control flow statements; lack of short-cut boolean expressions
>- compound variables - the only data structure you'll ever need?
>- weird handling of undefined/omitted variables/args
>- variable name scopes?
>- packages/namespaces/libraries?
>- purports to follow the principle of "least surprise", but I often find
>the opposite
>- slow (although that really isn't a language criticism)
>
My list, considerably overlapping yours:
Shortcomings:
No expressions in compound tails
No sharing variables between EXECs
No call by reference
No COPY/INCLUDE/SOURCE facility
No longITERATE/longLEAVE
No instream data facility (here-document)
-- gil
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