Re: Ternary operator -- RPG400-L

Don wrote:


Tom,

good question, and we could also ask why people insist on developing new
programming languages/environments versus improving what we already
have...  Frankly, I've yet to see anything done in a current language that
couldn't have been incorporated in good ole PL/I.....  :) :)

Oh well........

Ahhh! "good ole PL/I"! A truly marvellous language, developed before computer scientists had any decent understanding of what's really needed in a programming language. But before Pascal, and before C, PL/I had everything already. Things like structured programming and user defined types. Its problem was that it had *too* much. The designerS of PL/I looked at the programming languages in common use in the mid 1960's. But instead of selecting a sufficient subset of available language features, they tossed all known language concepts into a bowl, stirred it up, and called the resulting conglomeration "PL/I". We've come a long way since then! ;-)

Back on topic, if you think coding:

    if a>b;
       res = foo;
    else;
       res = bar;
    endif;

is too much work, you could shorten it by assigning values to an array and indexing into it:

    arr(1) = foo;
    arr(2) = bar;
    res = arr(%int(a>b)+1);

Alternatively, you could define your own "ternary" procedure, and call it like:

    res = ternary(a>b: foo: bar);

But these alternatives are still not quite like the "ternary" operator of a couple of other languages since both result expressions are evaluated.

BTW, this reminds me of a long debate in the Python community, where no one could agree either on the syntax for a "ternary" operator, or the very need for one. And so a decision was made by the BDFL to not bother adding it to the language.

Cheers! Hans

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