Re: MIDRANGE-L Digest V4 #342

Scott,

I did this once myself on a different platform, and it improved both
time to create new programs, and modifications on old programs.  Also,
I decided to do a customer pop up menu and found one place I could 
change a procedure to make it active in all my programs without
(in that language on that platform) having to recompile but one
source program!

In the module that returned a customer record, if the customer number
they entered was a "?" I had a window pop up and let them select a
customer, then returned that.  The original program had no idea anything
was changed and didn't care.

And new programs turned out to be a matter of 10's of lines instead of
hundreds of lines without all the file logic I/O.

And one day I decided to add journaling to this system, oh, shoot, I had 
to change one source file again and recompile it, and every program that
added/changed/deleted a record was journeled.

It does take work to get it there though, but I had gotten tired of modifying
every single one of my programs when I found a slicker way to doing things.
(Maybe I shouldn't use "slick" with the thread going on in RPG-L <grin>).

Regards,

Jim Langston

Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:42:34 -0500 (CDT)
From: Scott Klement <klemscot@klements.com>
Subject: RE: What counts as technically slick?

These are my sentiments exactly!  I one thought out and designed a
whole system for calling a seperate "library of functions" to access
a file, and in the end came to the conclusion that this wouldn't buy
me ANYTHING but complexity.  

The externally defined files ALREADY provide you with as much of a
layer of independence from I/O operations as these external routines
do!

I guess I could see doing this if I thought the files would soon be
located on another computer, on another platform, where I'd save the
work of re-writing all of the programs involved.   But how often does
something like this ever happen?   It never has, for me.
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