On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 09:43:42AM -0800, Larry Wall wrote:
> Unless line printers come back into vogue, I wouldn't put a lot of
> stress on it. These days, most reports are printed on browser screens.
That's what I figured.
> The fact is, the whole fixed-width character culture is in serious
> trouble with the advent of Unicode. Even xterm is having to come to
> terms with double-wide characters these days. We'll probably have to
> do something similar with format/write. (What we probably ought to do
> is redo the report writer to spit out XML tables or some such. :-)/2
>
> On the other hand, maybe fixed-width characters will be viewed as retro
> and cool in 5 years. You never know, you know...
Hey, they're retro and cool now!
Anyway, after sleeping on it, I've decided to contact the client and ask
them what they *mean* by "report generation" ... it's possible that
they mean "outputting text" and don't necessarily need to learn
format/write. Though as one of the other Netizen trainers remarked,
it's possible that if they're a fairly mainframey shop, format/write
will come naturally to them and it might be easy and worthwhile to teach
it.
K.
--
Kirrily Robert -- <[email protected]> -- http://netizen.com.au/
Internet and Open Source Development, Consulting and Training
Level 13, 500 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Phone: +61 3 9602 2452 Mobile: +61 419 119 429
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not
affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for
the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.