From: mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
Subject: Re: Blanks, REXX, and portability...
Date: 9 Sep 92 05:27:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: contessa.mwm.1udh
Distribution: world
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
X-NewsSoftware: Amiga Yarn 3.4, 1992/08/12 15:49:52

In <1992Sep5.134720.1@sejnet.sunet.se>, eric@sejnet.sunet.se (Eric Thomas) wrote:
> In article <mwm.1pdx@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us>, mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer) writes:
> > What you want it to be is whatever whoever generated the input thought
> > it would be.
> 
> Ah yes, the interpreter uses its divinatory powers to read the mind of whoever
> generated the input?

Nope, it's the programmer who has to have god-like powers. Especially
if you're using tools that things get done in in spite of, instead of
because of.

> > I.e. - I have to accept both space and tab as space, because the
> > standards document I'm using _says_ I do.
> 
> Really? Damn. I have all this mail software in REXX on my VM machine where the
> interpreter only stops on blanks, how can I possibly have made it respect the
> RFC? It must have cost me thousands of lines of code. Let me check it. Oh, it
> looks like all it took was a function call on ONE line out of several thousand,
> the one in the loop that reads the incoming header and calls the parser!

And it makes your software slower, bigger, harder to maintain, and
harder to port. But you're moving away from the language, so you
shouldn't care. I'm not quite so lucky.

> Anyway, I understand the issue much better now: we're back to the usual
> religious arguments.

Yup, it's religious. Some people believe that computers software
should be changed to make it more usefull; others believe that people
should change to match the tools they are given.

> People like Mike will never accept a solution which they perceive to be
> un-unixish.

You should follow your advice, and read carefully before flaming. I
don't give rats ass about Rexx on Unix; Unix has tools that are more
concise, more powerfull, and - most important of all - fit the
environment better.

But Rexx is becoming a de-facto standard on the Amiga, where I don't
have better tools. I'd like it to become a better tool than it is; one
where I don't have to add kludges to my programs because Rexx doesn't
understand the character set in this environment.

Now, if by "unixish", you mean general-purpose, powerfull, and a good
fit to the environment, I agree with you - I won't be happy with
something un-unixish. However, you seem to think that "unixish"
implies an oddball set of characteristics that I don't care about:

> REXX
> is intrinsically un-unixish: identifiers and statements are not case sensitive,
> the language is verbose, very few special characters are used, strings are not
> terminated by \0, the default value of a variable is its name in UPPER case,
> and so on.

Personally, the only thing about this list that bothers me is
variables having a default value. That's because it makes a large
class of typos hard to find, and I have the same complaint about any
programing language that has the same design flaw.

That's also the only thing on that list that Rexx does differently
from my favorite language.

	<mike
Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx