User talk:Gerard Schildberger: Difference between revisions

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Most of my updates (followups) are so minor that it would be distracting for casual readers what I've done, and I try to keep forcing my self to add comments to most of my REXX examples, something which seems might be a waste of time as I see very little evidence elsewhere of copious (or even brief) comments on (at) the statement level. I spend quite a bit of time dumbing-down my code to make it understandable for the novice (REXX) programmer. In doing so, I try to add (statement) comments on what the statements are doing/accomplishing, but the more advanced one gets, the more shortcuts one takes, and the code becomes obtuse with very little effort, sad to say.

REXX leads itself to writing a lot of "one-liner" subroutines (or, at the least, pretty short subroutines/procedures). This hides the commons tasks that happen over and over again, the duldrums of programming. The one-lines tend to end up at the bottom (end) of the program, usually after some kind of comment fence. Out of sight, out of mind. Most often, the one-lines are very general in nature and have been thourghly tested/debugged, and once written, almost never looked at again --- until Rosetta Code. Most REXX programmers write code on serveral classes of computers, PC's just being one. There is a lot of boilerplate to keep track of, environmental impacts, restrictions on command options, command names, command formats, terminal (console) support (linesize, screen width, fonts, file structure(s), file naming protocols, security concerns (read/write), operating system quirks (that's the polite word for it), etc, etc, etc. You wouldn'be believe the proglogue code that I have written (collected) over the ... ahem, decades of programming in REXX --

REXX leads itself to writing a lot of "one-liner" subroutines (or, at the least, pretty short subroutines/procedures). This hides the commons tasks that happen over and over again, the duldrums of programming. The one-lines tend to end up at the bottom (end) of the program, usually after some kind of comment fence. Out of sight, out of mind. Most often, the one-lines are very general in nature and have been thourghly tested/debugged, and once written, almost never looked at again --- until Rosetta Code. Most REXX programmers write code on serveral classes of computers, PC's just being one. There is a lot of boilerplate to keep track of, environmental impacts, restrictions on command options, command names, command formats, terminal (console) support (linesize, screen width), fonts, file structure(s), file naming protocols, security concerns (read/write), operating system quirks (that's the polite word for it), etc, etc, etc. You wouldn'be believe the proglogue code that I have written (collected) over the ... ahem, decades of programming in REXX --

cough, cough, since around 1982 or so. And I'm a regular packrat. PL/I was way back in 1866 , er, make that 1966. Anywhooose, I'll try to make more summaries, even if almost all of them are quite bland and/or uninteresting. [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]]