[mercury-users] Records

[Lee Naish]

>	IF MONTH OF START-DATE OF WS-EMPLOYMENT-RECORD <
>	   MONTH OF END-DATE OF WS-EMPLOYMENT-RECORD ...
>
>When I suggested that they use the second style, they complained about
>the verbosity of the "OF" syntax, saying that COBOL was already
>excessively verbose and that using "OF" would make it unbearable.
>
>But I guess these programmers were just not much keen on abstraction.

Obviously they were real hackers, otherwise they would have used
"LESS THAN" instead of "<" :-)  They are probably millionaires by now.

I also have a liking for the 'field of record' syntax.  By putting the
field name first its like having implictly defined functions.  You could
also use good old functional syntax, field(record), though this might
give people the wrong intuition wrt modes.

	lee
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