RE: Welcome new members

For the most part I agree that there are still a number of features that are
present in COBOL that RPG lacks.  As to your individual comments:

- Indented code

This is supported to a limited degree in D specs and C specs.  There will likely
be full support in C specs in the next RPG release.

- long field names (and be able to use them in calcs)

You mean 2056 characters isn't enough <grin>.  In practice I find the current
(practical) limit of 14 to be more than adequate.  If I recall correctly the
COBOL maximum is 30 but I never used them all. By contrast RPG supports 30 digit
numerics while COBOL's default behavior is still 18. Now that _is_ a limitation
that I have hit.

- record handling

Not clear what you mean by this. By using RPGIV's externally described DS
support together with the Prefix keyword I can handle things at the record
level.

- error trapping in free-format calcs (like EVAL x=y * z ON ERROR do something
else)

This has been "announced" by IBM in the form of the MONITOR group, which in many
ways is superior to COBOL's On error (which doesn't handle all errors by the
way). They are considering the possibility of allowing this to be more granular
(a la COBOL) but MONITOR is probably better since in general I don't care if a
single statement "blows" I want to know if anything goes wrong in a logically
related group of statements.

- data replication: move CORR to replicate data to fields of same name in other
records

There has never been a need for this in absolute terms since you cannot have two
fields of the same name in different structures. I would love to see them do a
similar thing though where the field prefix governed which fields were alike.

- (and the converse: unlike RPG, dont replicate the data if the programmer
doesnt want to!)

You can already handle this with Prefix at the file level.


The one biggie that COBOL is missing for me is prototyping of program calls and
the ability to define subprocedures. These have made a huge difference in my RPG
coding but I can't do it in COBOL.


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