Re: This is cool.

On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 6:40 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Alan, when you say "Before I would have had to do something like ..."

When is "before" because I can't see anything in the technique that could not have been done many moons ago. Ugly as sin but it could be done in the original RPG IV if not RPG/400 - just not as easily.

Well, if you're saying that it was "ugly as sin" before and it isn't
now, then I consider that in itself to be a considerable improvement.

I don't know when it is that *N was introduced as a kind of dummy
placeholder. If it has been there from the beginning of free-form D
specs, then indeed, Alan's snippet is precisely (and merely) a
transliteration of the columnar D spec idiom into free-form D spec.

So maybe it's not "new", but Alan never claimed it was new, merely
cool. It's still as cool as it ever was, and it may well be new to
some.

John Y.