Hi Ron,
I don't know what version you worked on, but I worked with Information
in the mid 80s and the THEN was supported, both on READ and IF. I would
have gone ballistic if it hadn't been, since I ported many of my
utilities. I don't know about OPEN, I rarely use THEN with OPEN even
now. I also don't remember what version I was on (memory is the first
thing to go).
Charlie Noah
Charles W. Noah Associates
[email protected]
The views and opinions expressed herein are my own (Charlie Noah) and do
not necessarily reflect the views, positions or policies of any of my
former, current or future employers, employees, clients, friends,
enemies or anyone else who might take exception to them.
On 03-04-2011 2:10 PM, Ron Hutchings wrote:
I am not crazy about IF (condition) ELSE logic but the compiler supports it.
The versions of Information I was on did not support THEN on the reads until
the 90s. Once it was available we jumped on it.
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 13:25:48 +0000
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [U2] Is this worth rewriting?
What absolute and utter rubbish!
You never had to write "IF (test) ELSE ..." in Pick.
READ did have a THEN clause as far back as I can remember (mid-80s) -
only LOCKED came later.
You just don't use it that often because you usually only want to do
something if your READ fails.
Typically READ rec FROM FILE,Id ELSE rec = ""
IF is different. I at least expect that after a test I'll do something
if the condition is true.
The ELSE clause is optional.
I wasn't even aware you could leave the THEN clause out until I
encountered some code that did that.
That is IMHO one of the worst coding sins and I always change it to IF
NOT(test) THEN if I find it anywhere.
I just have been bitten too many times with this nonsense code.
Aren't I lucky that I don't have to maintain your code? :-P
You wouldn't say ' if you brush your teeth else you get decay' in a
conversation, so why would you want to do it in your code?
But hey, why make life easy for the next guy if with a little bit of
effort you can make it really difficult?
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read, right?
The only thing that forced us to write code as compact as possible in
the really olden days was the 32K item size limit.
On 04/03/2011 10:50, Wols Lists wrote:
On 03/03/11 20:50, Tony Gravagno wrote:
Some people apparently have brains that toggle IF NOT ELSE faster
than others. But apparently this construct is of concern to some
people, whether as a matter of elegance or a matter of coding
effectiveness. Recognizing this, the more I can eliminate those
lines where I or someone else needs to "brain stutter" out of the
flow, the better I think the code is.
Problem is, what causes some people to stutter is what other people find
easy. Two cases in point ...
A lot of my code does "if (test) else", which is a very "pick"
construct. In fact, a lot of code *had* to be written that way because a
lot of conditional statements (READ etc) didn't have a THEN back then.
And when I was learning C. I taught my instructor a trick or two - an
exercise was to count how many 3's in a pack of cards. So I did
count += (value == 3);
When I read my code out for the instructor to write on the board, he
just couldn't hear it right until I spelt it out letter by letter.
Again, it's stuff I'd expect a Pickie to do without having to think! But
the instructor just couldn't get it until he'd written it on the board
and took a good hard look.
Cheers,
Wol
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