I realize I'm new to this forum, not on the project committee, and no one here knows me from Adam's house cat. I do have an opinion on this topic I wish to share though so please excuse the brief introduction. Though I'm new "here", I'm certainly not new to REXX or to software development in general. I've been in the business for going on 40 years (yes, I'm a main-framer) and I currently work in CICS engineering for a very large financial firm. REXX is my friend, I've used it for many years, and probably have used it to accomplish things that it's own mama (papa?) never dreamed of. I've written my own REXX functions in assembler to do strange things such as dis-assembling a CICS DFHSITxx load module and pass back its parameterized contents in a stem structure so I can feed the information into a configuration database. (It seemed easier than building a general assembler source parser to get the information). We're running upwards of 1,500 CICS regions here, so having tools to help manage their configuration is a matter of survival.
I think changing the traditional behavior of NUMERIC DIGITS is a bad idea, mostly for the reasons Mike Cowlishaw and others have enumerated. Just within my own company I've learned that if I ever find myself deciding on a design approach and asking myself a question like, "I wonder if anyone here ever does X, uses Y, or needs Z..", that I should automatically assume which ever answer is the most detrimental to what I'm trying to do and makes it the most difficult, and proceed as if it were the iron-clad truth. I can't speak for anyone else, but in my own experience when I ask questions like that, its usually because I'm trying to get out of doing extra work that I already know I ought to do. Its not just about existing scripts/code, its also about those who in the future might attempt to build something and run afoul of this platform-dependent nuance and give up in frustration. If bif's have problems, then those problems ought to be corrected in the bif's. I realize there are areas where by necessity the language has to vary due to platform due to the interfaces to the underlying operating system (or lack thereof), but I don't think the core language features should be one of those places unless its truly unavoidable. My opinion, thanks for listening. Robert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Oorexx-devel mailing list Oorexx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel
