No bee in my bonnet. Just don’t like braggarts. What is more complex? The developers who wrote zOS or the installation? The programs I wrote over my programming days were much more complex than anything I’ve written in my SP days. And I’ve written REXX & CLIST. Not all that hard.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Sunday, August 22, 2021, 2:21 PM, Jeremy Nicoll <jn.ls.mfrm...@letterboxes.org> wrote: On Sun, 22 Aug 2021, at 18:43, Bill Johnson wrote: > Anyone who writes a compiler or assembler is quite complex. And very > likely thousands of lines of code that took years to develop. More than just a few thousand, I'd expect, unless it's very-table-driven. > More in line with the COBOL programs I was referencing. Not some 40 > line REXX program that took a day or two. You seem to have a bee in your bonnet about 40-line REXX programs. Why? What makes you think that REXX programs can't also be much much longer? > In College, I wrote an ATM machine. It > took the entire semester and was my class project. Way more complex > than a 40 line REXX/CLIST There you go again. Did you get out of bed on the wrong side today? > or the APL mirage you mention. Show me the 1 > line complex APL program. Remembering, I’m a math major. I haven't programmed in APL since the early 1980s, so I cannot produce an example of my own. But you could look at the "Game of Life" and "HTML tags removal" code examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) to get an idea of how unreadable APL can be. Note that it has a right to left execution order, and a huge range of operators which almost all do different things depending on whether they are used in a monadic or dyadic way - like the difference between the way "-" in arithmetic is either used for negation or subtraction. People who like deliberately writing impenetrable APL expressions tend to write heavily nested expressions. Of course such things are unmaintainable - it's a bit like the impossibility of understanding a complex regular expression at a glance. It's definitely a programming language where people learn idiomatic ways of achieving something then don't look again at the nitty-gritty of what a series of operators actually do. If someone strings a sequence of idioms together in one statement it's hard to see where each one starts and ends. And if someone subtlely changes something inside what looks like an idiom (but isn't) it'd be hard to spot that too. Although APL is good at handling multi-dimensional matrices of numbers it can be used for non-mathematical things too; eg I wrote a simple full- screen text editor, in APL, for editing APL functions. At the time the supported (built-in) way of editing APL functions was much more like line-mode editing of BASIC code. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
