Re: Quick question on readability

Adam,

 Sorry, poor choice of words made by a barnacled old RPGer. That technique
is indeed common in other languages and has been available in RPG since
the EVAL statement came out.

 I'm not sure I'd ever use it, though, because for me it is just as
non-intuitive as the old GTLTEQ resulting indicators on the fixed-form
SETLL and CHAIN statements. How many times did I bang my shins on
those...

 Program logic is enough to keep my mind occupied. If I have the choice
between writing a no-brainer 'if' statement, or writing code that will
require me, six months from now, to mentally parse an expression, I'll
choose the former.

JK

Perhaps it is because I was not raised on 'C', but a
quick glance at a statement like "namedIndicator = (var1 = var2);" just
isn't intuitive. RPG has abandoned many of its old abbreviations and
shortcuts (like conditioning and resulting indicators) for the sake of
readability, so why begin using obscure techniques from other languages?

I wouldn't call this an "obscure trick from [another] language".  I think
it's a property of most computer languages that the result of any given
expression can be assigned to a variable, and I expect this has been
available in RPG for quite a long time.  I don't think that comparing this
to conditioning indicators is accurate.  This is a general rule about the
result of an expression, where as I need to work out the meaning of a
given indicator each time I encounter it.  Then again, maybe that's just
because I started with other languages :)