On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 00:45:12 -0400, Phil Smith III wrote: >Y'all are dancing on the head of a pin. As Shmuel said, Rexx has one datatype, >period. It has the DATATYPE function that can do some >analysis on a variable's contents and tell you whether it's all numeric, hex, >etc. That's basically it. Arguing about whether it's a >"string" or a "character string" is just more dancing: since there's only the >one type, what does it matter? > In creative writing, variety is the soul; in technical writing, it's the devil. Using "string" in some places and "character string" in others without defining both is bad practice.
This fiber of the thread frayed off when someone with a PL/I background said that in Rexx '1'b can be used as [a value for TRUE]. No, it's syntactically invalid to do that. On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 04:49:13 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: >Have you ever heard of PL/I? Much of the syntax of REXX derives from PL/I, and >it has two different string types: CHARACTER and BIT. > But it is not the responsibility of Rexx documentation to distinguish itself and/or adopt jargon from that of all other programming languages. In TSO-Rexx James Campbell posted a good critique of my critique. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
