Re: RPG colon as delimiter

On 20-Jul-2016 09:38 -0500, Raul A Jager W wrote:

<<SNIP>> Other "funny" thing in RPG is the use of "colon" between
parameter or indexes, and that is because in "the rest of the world"
the comma is used to mark the decimals. In other languages we must
adopt the "decimal point" when writing programs.

Perhaps the choice of colon (:) as delimiter is "funny" [meaning
unusual or strange, not meaning humorous] to some people, but that
choice is quite "sensible" [meaning logical and intelligent], to those
for whom making considerations for the /global/ nature of programming
is important. While IBM has [and many others have also] made some
notably poor decisions in programming languages, with regard to the
topic of /globalization/, that specific choice of colon over comma in
RPG is a clear winner.

Too bad the originators of the SQL did not make a similarly sensible
choice, so that irrespective the locale of the programmer, requests
like VALUES(1,2) would be unambiguous. Sadly, most people in the USA
who actually know what that values-construct is, probably think that
particular example usage is unambiguous :-( Those same people do not
realize that when their code is properly copied, *identically* [with
necessary CCSID conversions], that the effects experienced by whomever
copies can be quite different, depending on whom and whence is the
programmer making that copy, despite their use of an identical
compiler and run-time.

FWiW: With an "other" language, specifically the DB2 for i SQL, the
comma as decimal separator is allowed generally, with a configurable
option; i.e. there is no requirement for a coder with preference of
comma-as-decimal-point to code the period-as-decimal-point in their
numeric literals. Even so, the SQL parser still demands effectively,
that every comma that is not a decimal-separator should be further
punctuated by a blank\space when abutting a digit; that is because,
there is no configurable option to choose an alternative to the comma
as the default token-delimiter.