RE: (no subject)

Jim,
I don't buy into the "what's wrong with it" argument. Meaning, you imply
that it is correct and needs justification to prove it wrong.

I don't really mind them; I just think that the "all or nothing" school
of design is lazy. People like me who do not have an $85 Billion/year
company behind them can afford to do certain things in an all or nothing
way. But when it impacts billions and billions of lines of code, it
should be done correctly.

Again, as I said, I don't mind it being confusing, after all, I doubt
most people will use the free form stuff in production. Now that doesn't
mean that 100 percent will NOT use it. I'm sure 100 two 200 RPG
programmers will use it. Most of them are on this list or my list. But
the vast majority of people won't bother with it. Why do I think this?
Because they already know RPG III or RPG IV and to them, those languages
are good enough.

Case in point, most people would love to have a built-in function to
convert character values (with decimals) to numeric. But we have 5 or 6
ways of doing the ADD operation in RPG instead. I guess the fixed format
ADD was too hard to use. <g> (Just kidding on that one.)




Bob Cozzi
cozzi@rpgiv.com
Visit the new on-line iSeries Forums at: http://www.rpgiv.com/forum

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com [mailto:rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com]
On
> Behalf Of Jim Langston
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 2:16 PM
> To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: (no subject)
>
> Bob,
>
> Ignoring other programing languages completely, what is wrong with
> having semi colons at the end of every statement?  In fact, when I
> first started coded, I often would try to stick a semi colon at the
> end of my if statements and wonder why my programs wouldn't work
> right, it just seemed logical to me, at the time, that if they should
> be at the end of statements, why wouldn't they belong at the end of
> every statement?
>
> Of course, to facilitate this, C's if statement has it's own
limitations.
> In freeform RPG we can say
> If X = Y;
> can't do that in C, sytax error, need parenthesis to surround your
> logical expression.
>
> It's a trade off either way you look at it.  By adding semi colons to
> the end of If type statements we have thrown off the shackles of other
> artificial if constructs to make up for it [ (}'s and {}'s ].
>
> As far as PL/I, no clue, never even seen a PL/I statement in my life.
> No idea what limitations it places on if statements to make up for
> missing the semi colon.
>
> JMO.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jim Langston
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com
[mailto:rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com]On
> Behalf Of Bob Cozzi (RPGIV)
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 11:54 AM
> To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: (no subject)
>
>
> Let's not start a rumor that I want C instead of RPG. I was simply
> stating that (in broader terms here) that even a poorly conceived
syntax
> of a language like C doesn't require semi colons at the end of
> conditional statements.
>
> My favorite is PL/I which also doesn't require them on conditional
> statements.
> >From what I hear from IBM, they don't have technological reasoning
> behind most enhancements that have been implemented but rather they do
> them for one of several reasons, including but not limited to:
>
> It's the best way to do it.
> It's a good enough way and we've run out of time to make it better.
> It's the way Hans wants it <g>.
> We RPG programmers are too dumb to figure out the right way, so we'll
do
> it this other way.
>
>
> I'm sure there's more reasons but those are the one's I've heard of
from
> several X-IBM Language Lab people.
>
> Bob Cozzi
> cozzi@rpgiv.com
> Visit the new on-line iSeries Forums at: http://www.rpgiv.com/forum
>
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