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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sunic!sejnet.sunet.se!eric
- From: eric@sejnet.sunet.se (Eric Thomas)
- Subject: Re: Blanks, REXX, and portability...
- Message-ID: <1992Sep5.134720.1@sejnet.sunet.se>
- Lines: 49
- Sender: news@sunic.sunet.se
- Reply-To: ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE
- Organization: SUNET, Stockholm, Sweden
- References: <9208270054.AA19196@SERVER.uwindsor.ca> <ANDERS.92Aug27063035@lise3.lise.unit.no> <1992Aug27.175521.1@sejnet.sunet.se> <mwm.1pdx@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us>
- Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1992 13:47:20 GMT
-
- In article <mwm.1pdx@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us>, mwm@contessa.palo-alto.ca.us (Mike Meyer) writes:
- > In <1992Aug27.175521.1@sejnet.sunet.se>, eric@sejnet.sunet.se (Eric Thomas) wrote:
- >> Ok, time for the usual stupid question. Say I have a program that does:
- >>
- >> Parse var line ':'tagname'.'value' :'line
- >>
- >> Say I run that program on an ASCII system which recognize the 20-odd types of
- >> blanks Otto showed in his posting. Where does my 'value' variable end, when the
- >> interpreter encounters a SPACE followed by colon (ancient, despicable, evil
- >> EBCDIC-type behaviour, surely that must not be the case), or also when it
- >> encounters TAB followed by colon (nice, modern ASCII-type behaviour which
- >> happens to break the program because that is not what the programmer wanted
- >> and thought the interpreter would do).
- >
- > 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? Seeing a literal of ' :', it thinks "Aww, this must be one
- of these NAMES file IBM thingies, let's stop on a blank only". Seeing ': ', it
- thinks "Ah, this is clearly someone parsing a RFC822 header, let's stop on any
- white space".
-
- > 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! But to
- think I had to key in an extra 30 characters when THE SYSTEM should have known
- what I meant to do and done it for me :((((((( I will petition the ANSI REXX
- committee to change the language so I never have to do that again!!!!!!
-
- Anyway, I understand the issue much better now: we're back to the usual
- religious arguments. People like Mike will never accept a solution which they
- perceive to be un-unixish. Well as Mike pointed out, I don't really give a damn
- since I'm moving away from REXX, but I find this both funny and saddening. 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. REXX has its own personality, and it can never become unixish no
- matter how hard you try. So I find it strange that people who want to unixify
- REXX even bother, when there are a lot of other unix scripting languages to
- choose from. On the other hand, I am not really surprised - the spirit of the
- crusades will live forever, I suppose this is human nature.
-
- Eric
-