Development, round II

From: Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk <(Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk)>
Date: Thu Jan 29 07:06:44 1998

> ;-) Clearing the snow from my glasses, I saw Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk
> typed:
>
> [nip about REXX]
>
> >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.

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.
Received on Thu Jan 29 1998 - 07:06:44 GMT