We must be careful we don't cut ourselves on such a sharp edge-case.
The salient arguments boil down to:
- The Principle of Least Astonishment argues for modifying ooRexx to
match the behavior of other Rexx'es.
- The Policy of Least Exceptions argues that ooRexx has the right rule.
The purist in me contends that the ooRexx behavior is the correct one,
and we should simply update the errortext: "DIGITS value must be a
positive whole number expressible under the current setting of
"NUMERIC DIGITS nn"; found "dd". We could do that for ooRexx and
NetRexx, but the likelihood of any IBM Rexx processor following suit,
is nil.
There is a valid argument for making ooRexx consistent with all the
other Rexx'es out there, especially the huge installed base of IBM
Rexx code. One might hope that the number of ooRexx programs affected
by this change could be expressed in Numeric Digits 2, but who knows
where (or how critical) that code may be. This will also require
documenting (and test-casing) this exception to the current behavior.
But it won't be the only place that the design of Rexx has bent an
ideal consistency to the reality of dealing with humans.
As big a fan of consistency as I am, I'm afraid I come down on the
more pragmatic PLA side of this issue, especially given the expected
amount of code affected.
-Chip-
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