I refer to such helpful operators as "Molly Malone", from "She of a faever, from which none could save her, and that was the end of sweet Molly Malone".
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Paul Gilmartin <0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2019 1:28 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Where put the notional constant in a condition (Was RE: JCL COND Parameter) On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:51:57 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >OOREXX now allows the equivalent of expressions in tails: > > stem[tail expression] > What are those strange characters, "[" and "]"? What are their EBCDIC code points? >If X is a floating point (REAL) variable, why shouldn't x**(-1) be legal? > X**(-0.5) is more a problem when X may be negative. >A for using a floating point variable as a control variable, I have no >sympathy. In the real world, measuring devices have errors and you should >never expect equality of floating point numbers. > C really hasn't a control variable; merely initial, final, and terminal conditions. Rexx has control variables, but unlike other languages they may be modified within the loop, with well-specified semantics. In ALGOL-68, the loop statement itself declares the control variable, which is local to the repetitive block and acts like a constant in that it's syntactically prohibited to modify it. >I have never seen DWIM. ... > Indeed. And a Bad Example is batch operators who "fix" programmers' coding errors to do the favor of sparing a turnaround latency. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
