SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

<< Previous Message << >> Next Message >>

Date:	Sun, 5 Jan 2003 12:19:47 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Re: ASK.exe ?

Content Type: text/plain

Lynn H. Maxson wrote:
>
> Peter,
>
> I am somewhat over my pique that after pressuring me
> to give a presentation you didn't even bother to show
> up...probably offering some excuse about SD in-laws.

Yes, I pushed you into it, didn't I? And San Diego is my offered
excuse (I've missed the past five SCOUG meetings because of them).
Right now I feel like I somehow should have tried even harder down there
-- the pressure was just too much for one of them and last Tuesday they
took matters into their own hands; we turned off life support the
following day.

> Frankly REXX leaves me cold when it comes to
> readability. I can easily understand why people
> used to a universe of filter sequences have met
> the challenge of understanding it as a process.

Half of the lines in my source files are comments. That's so _I_ can
figure out what I did when I take a look at them a few years later.

I like filters, Lynn. I can very quickly build a solution for the data
file that I have. To me it's flexibility, like the infinite fine tuning
you can do when making a query with SQL (_now_ I've set him off!).

> So if this ASK thingee is open source, I would be
> more than happy to assist in converting it to PL/I
> along with all the enhancements you seem to be seeking.
> Maybe we could write a C2PLI translator and replace
> the entire porting URL with a "use this" aid.

The spec is simple. "Make it do exactly what Norton's BE ASK does."

ASK "prompt" [responses] [DEFAULT=key] [TIMEOUT=n] [ADJUST=n] [color]

I'd like to add an option to echo or not echo the user's response:

[ECHO=y/n/u/l]

where u and l force the echo to upper or lower case.

> I do think we could use a good open source editor ... We
> could add ... We could drop ... That would allow us to
> submit an unordered set of procedures on input which the
> software could order based on internal reference patterns.

I'd still like to learn Prolog some day.

> That same process would also allow us to generate
> multiple object modules from the same set of
> unordered input as a single unit of work.

I have some code here which lets me "convert" a source file so it can be
compiled under different languages. It's not a translator; I write the
"master" code as a series of comment sections, then fill out each
section in the different desired languages using tags (sort of like
HTML) to distinguish what's what. The converter creates a compilable
file in the chosen language. While working in one of the desired
languages you make changes to the compilable file; when it works the
changed code is merged back into the master (each section has an i.d.
number tag so the merging is pretty simple).

The main problem I run into is that you have to _design_ programs
differently based on the language; the procedures don't necessarily map
one-to-one as you change from one language to another. Error handling
is especially insidious.

Some languages just can't be used for certain applications. When I
played with Java a while back, for example, I couldn't get it to
properly accept a command line parameter which was a quoted string
containing adjacent spaces. For example, Java (at that time anyway)
wouldn't properly pass the following command line parameter string to
the program:

"FOUR SPACES"

Maybe they've fixed it by now. Or maybe I wasn't grabbing the string
properly. I finally looked for a way to grab the entire command line
string so I could parse it myself, but you couldn't do that either.
Maybe I needed a stub .exe program which would somehow (pipe? tempfile?)
pass the info to the Java program.

> No make, no link, no sift,

sift? whazzat?

> Just something with readable source that presents less
> of a learning challenge to a programming wannabe.

Lynn, you know I've been interested in your SL/I for quite a while. My
ASK program is about as simple as "Hello, World" -- can we write the
specs for ASK as if they were to be given to your SL/I black box so I
can see exactly how it works?

What would the SL/I document look like for ASK? Or at least, tell me
how many lines do you think it might contain?

- Peter

=====================================================

To unsubscribe from this list, send an email message
to "steward@scoug.com". In the body of the message,
put the command "unsubscribe scoug-programming".

For problems, contact the list owner at
"rollin@scoug.com".

=====================================================

Return to [ 05 | January | 2003 ]

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.