On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 13:41, Michael Short wrote:
> Being an ol' mainframe guy of 35+ years who has looked at a lot of
> languages, I say REXX in conjunction with PIPELINES is unbeatable in terms
> of writing speed and conciseness. You can get a lot of function in a few
> lines of code.
I'm not a very good Perl programmer--my perl basically looks like Bourne
shell with regexps and the <> construct.
But Rexx cannot do one thing that I find absolutely indispensable.
Hashes and stems are pretty much the same thing.
But in Perl, I can say
foreach(keys(%hash)) {
# $_ now holds the hash key...
do something....
}
Which simply says, "take an associative array, and loop over each
defined value". There's no way in Rexx to get a list of all the key
names in the key/value pairs that make up a stem. I find that a huge
problem in terms of conceptualizing problems the intuitive way for me.
Adam
