The statements > I have known of programmers who would never use the value of a relational > expression > other than in an IF statement.
"You can code FORTRAN in any language." require comment. I have known such programmers too; and it is a fair criticism of COBOL as it is currently used that---apart from not yet implemented new-standard language extensions---it makes this necessary. The comment about FORTRAN is just rhetoric, misconceived for FORTRANs later than FORTRAN II. FORTRAN IV, introduced in the middle 60s, and its sequelæ all have logical variables and operators for negation, disjunction and conjunction. One can set a logical variable in an assignment statement and use it later, in other logical assignment statements or in IF statements. The more general notion that one can bring the habits and idioms appropriate to one statement-level procedural language into another SLPL is unexceptionable if banal. I have seen COBOL written by someone whose métier was clearly RPG; I have seen LISP quite obviously written by someone whose métier was COBOL; and anyone with significant experience reading other people's code could multiply such examples. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
