28 Jan
1998
28 Jan
'98
11:06 p.m.
;-) Clearing the snow from my glasses, I saw
Philip.Belben(a)powertech.co.uk
typed:
[nip about REXX]
Sorry, Roger, I didn't mean to start a language war. I've never used
Perl, but I'm told it's good.
REXX, like (I think) Perl, is a macro language. It is designed for
doing little tasks that don't need lots of computing power. I like REXX
- I really enjoyed using it at IBM. But it is an interpreted language -
if I was writing a major application I'd use a compiler - and numbers
stored as strings are fundamentally slow - I'd use one which stored
numbers in a way that is fast to use.
But I was being careless. I was actually thinking "number crunching"
when I said "serious programming". (NB I _have_ done number crunching
in REXX - the potentially infinite precision is very useful!)
Philip.
PS *** OFF TOPIC - Sam Ismail need read no further :-) ***
Manhole covers (and the apertures at the entrances of manholes :-) ) are
indeed round because they then won't fall down the hole if you drop
them. But other shapes share this property - triangular manholes are
quite common over here. Any "Curve of constant diameter" also has this
property. Examples of such curves may be found in the 7-sided coins in
use in the UK for 50p and 20p
P.
REXX is/was
quite a nice language to use, but some features rendered it unsuitable
for serious programming - numbers, for example, are stored as strings of
digits in the character code of the machine you are using...
Uh, Sir Philip?
Maybe there are other reasons that your statement of unsuitability stands,
but I can think of one programming language that's very handy (& powerful &
serious) which stores it's digits as charcter codes: Perl. From experience
I can tell you that one heckuva lot more stuff gets done with Perl on the
WWW than Java -- and it's a lot easier to pgm. in.