RE: Attention Users of *SYSTEM State

-----Original Message-----
From: mi400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mi400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Paul Godtland
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 12:24 PM
To: MI Programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: [MI400] Attention Users of *SYSTEM State


>Wow, I love your post, Harry!

Me too, Harry.  What you wrote was great!

>You also asked for new tools to be more competitive. Here's your
>chance to ask for specific, helpful interfaces. Please take
>full advantage of it, to help all of us who want this
>computer system to continue to succeed.

a few things come to mind Paul.

-  provide the source code of the the ILE C++ compiler, at least the C run
time and STL part of it. As it is, ILE C++ is unusable to me because any use
of the STL injects terminal session start and end code into the executable.
If my program is not using stdin and stdout, or is redirecting those objects
to other than terminal sources, the executable should not be starting up the
terminal session.

- provide the source code to the rpg ile compiler.  I would like to
implement something equivalent to objective C ( at least my understanding of
it ) in RPG. I want RPG structs to have constructors and destructors.  I
would like an ILE RPG program to be able to instantiate a C++ class and call
an exported class member function in an ILE C++ module.  Also, the reverse,
C++ to RPG.

- RPG Free procedure code is a great candidate in my view to be broken off
as a programming language on its own. Without the F Specs and other global
features of RPG that prevent the language from being completely modular and
thread safe.   Release the RPG compiler source code so that an effort like
that could be attempted.

- Correct whatever has to be corrected to allow multiple threading within
the interactive subsystem.

- Are there any plans for IBM to be competitive on the programming language
front with Microsoft?  As it is Microsoft provides very good facilities for
the reuse of code across their product lines. The .NET CLI provides the
specifications for C++ and C#, two languages with memory models as different
from each other as RPG and Java are, to be used interchangeably in a
program. The bottom line is I want to be able to reuse my C++ code in my
cross platform IBM applications.   Microsoft provides that ability now in
.NET.  Or do I have to discard all my RPG and C++ code and start new in
Java?

thanks,

-Steve Richter