On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 17:13:58 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
>foo = value('BAR',,baz)
>________________________________________
>From: Charles Mills
>Sent: Friday, June 5, 2020 12:27 PM
>
>It is SO counter-intuitive to put the name of a variable in quotes. You would
>not code ENQ ('MYMAJOR','MYMINOR',E,8).
>Once you realize that EXECIO is an external command, not a language keyword,
>you start to get it.
>
Rexx grammar is a glorious context-sensitive chaos. As when
I tried to understand the ANSI spec for ADDRESS and failed.
MFC's intent was to be intuitive rather than axiomatic.
Perhaps Rexx General Concepts should contain a section
on use of symbol names with an incomplete list:
PROCEDURE EXPOSE
not quoted
ADDRESS
sometimes not quoted
VALUE(); SYMBOL();
quoted
ADDRESS LINK*/ATTCH*
arguments quoted in separate strings
EXECIO ... ( STEM )
quoted
Documented elsewhere:
BPXWDYN( ... MSG() )
stem, descriptor, keyword lexically distinguished
BPXWUNIX( stdin, stdout, stderr )
stem, ddname lexically distinguished
ADDRESS SYSCALL
quoted ( symbol name )
ADDRESS ISPEXEC/ISREDIT
shared variable references
ADDRESS SDSF
various stems
And your favorites?
-- gil
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