David Crayford wrote: <begin extract> I think you should abandon the idea of trying to replicate perl syntax. Perl makes me want to hurl, it's user hostile. </end extract>
I agree strongly with his recommendation [without necesarily agreeing with his judgment of the 'absolute' merits Perl's syntax]. The problem here is, I think, one of concordance or coherence. Anyone who knows something of a statement-level language should be able to make plausible, almost invariably confirmed conjectures about how the rest of it goes; and mixing syntactic sugars defeats this. The syntax of ALL non-assignment PL/I and REXX statements, CICS commands, and some but not all IBM utilities is the same simple, well understood one. Lexical breakout is thus the same for any and all such statements, and token parsing can be table-driven. In a REXX environment it is better and much easier to stick to it. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
