In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Bradburn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > James Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My main use is for web development, both online and off.
> Me too :-) I think that there are many people like myself, who split off > the programming path between BASIC and C or C++, but who now want to do > more than pure HTML on websites. > I started off ... I don't think it makes much difference what language one uses for this kind of thing; those that let you read/write a whole file in one statement and (like perl) scan through it easily, are saving you the effort of writing the logic for that yourself. My experience of other such languages (eg SAS) is that this is fine until you want to take control back and do something more sophisticated with the data. Then (maybe perl isn't so bad) the program code needs quite a lot of changes to disable all the automatic opening/ reading/scanning/ writing that the language in question has done on your behalf... The version of Rexx that I've used on mainframes has the facility to do much of this in single statements, but also you can do things byte by byte if you want. Rexx on my RPC, as far as I know, doesn't have file-at a-time IO. But in neither Rexx or BASIC or I guess, any other language, is ot hard to write a function that will read a whole file to some point, write one one from that point, or scan that in-storage version of the file. BASIC's real restriction for this is the 256 chars max in a string... but you can program around that. At least anything written in BASIC will work on every other RO machine and - for mor naive users - thy don't need to get hung up on the problems of installing (or trying to understand) what yet another language processor actually does. And if te program falls over witha BASIC runtime error message, lots of people can help, but with Perl/Python/Rexx/whatever hardly anyone has any ida (sorry, no pun intended, idea). -- Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
