Re: RPG

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 7:13 AM, CRPence <crpbottle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 19-Jul-2016 18:30 -0500, John Yeung wrote:

In most languages, the following code snippet is not a complete,
self-contained statement:

if x > 0

Since it's not a statement, it shouldn't end in a semicolon.

I had the same observation, initially. But I soon, and I must say quite
easily, overcame that feeling\issue I was having with coding the free form
RPG if[-then] construct; [...] so easily overcome,
probably because the following is quite familiar to me, and was already
quite comfortable for me to write:

if (x>0) then do; /* as PL/… is familiar to me */

Right. So RPG isn't the only one. But PL/I (and dialects thereof,
which I guess is what you mean by the ellipsis) isn't a language that
is usually in the conversation about familiarity with "other
languages".

If you are used to IBM i CL, then surely you can easily follow a
similar line of thinking (because the statement structure is there;
you just add the semicolons). I find CL ugly and awkward too.

If RPG's free-form syntax was meant to attract PL/I programmers, then
great. If it was meant to attract C, Pascal, Java, etc. programmers,
well, I guess on the whole it's still better than fully columnar
syntax. (Assembly programmers on the other hand....)

While in that analogy the observation and implication seems apropos, do
other programming languages that you are thinking of, in contrast, actually
analogize with [the above example of] English punctuated writing? Some
might use bracketing, and that certainly must look just as strange and
non-intuitive from a perspective of a long-term English punctuation user?:

You're introducing more into the analogy than what was intended. I
focused on one particular English example of limited scope to
illustrate one particular RPG syntactical quirk of limited scope.

You can ALWAYS destroy an analogy by expanding it, unless the analogy
is identical to the thing it is analogizing.

John Y.