Some senseless babbling from Ivan Todoroski to David Noon
on 15 Jan 99  04:53:00 about Pl/I...

[snip]
 IT> But I was wondering if there is some PL/I equivalent to REXX's
 IT> xrange(), so that one could avoid typing the translation tables by
 IT> hand?

 IT> In REXX it would simply be:

 IT> say translate(infile, xrange("A","Z"),
xrange("a","z"))
[snip]

While this works in ASCII and EBCDIC, there's no guarantee that letters in 
a code page are assigned in alphabetical order.  Simply typing the alphabet 
once avoids the potential problem (I'll admit I don't know of any character 
set where it is a problem), and it only needs to be typed once.

There's also the possibility that while the characters will be in order, 
there will be other non-alpha characters in the middle, that could 
unwittingly be translated incorrectly.

Of course, I also never use anything other than || to concatenate in REXX, 
because I make what I want to accomplish explicit.

Mike Ruskai
thanny{at}home.com


... Be careful what you ask for. You never know who's lurking.
--- Renegade v05-11 Exp