Re: V5R2: Source now allowed in the IFS

Hello Vernon,

The following comments are based on pre-520 OS/400.

You wrote:
>C can be longer - we've used, from time to time, up to 240 record
>length, but it gets a little old to pan left/right.

I've used 240 byte source file when porting C code from other platforms
but I rarely use more than 80 bytes for my own code.  Windowing left
and right in any source editor is a real pain.

>I've not jumped out of the box far enough to see if RPG works in an
>RPGLE source file (20 bytes longer), or if CL NEEDS to be 92.

The RPG compiler will tolerate larger source record lengths.  It just
ignores the extra stuff -- really useless for free-form.  CL will use
all available space which can make the results of prompting commands a
little ugly -- one long line of CL is a bit ugly!  PL1, COBOL, MI,
Fortran, Pascal don't care and will use the full record length.

>Some things are required - QMQRY HAS to be 91, QMFORM 162 (or close to
>that number). I don't know about UIM source. And REXX is another
>matter - don't know about that either, but that's not compiled,
>anyhow. Wonder if we'll be able to run REXX out of the IFS.

As far as I know the compilers don't care about actual record lengths
but some of them have preferences or maximum data lengths.  QM will
allow longer record lengths but won't read anything after its maximum
data length -- hence the warning message about record length.  UIM
doesn't care and will use the full length.  Who uses Rexx?  Given that
we've had Rexx on OS/400 for over 10 years and almost no-one uses it I
doubt that IBM will add stream file support.  Just another example of
the slothfulness of OS/400 programmers -- they keep wanting
enhancements to CL when they could already be using Rexx to satisfy the
requirement.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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