RE: "Real ILE" ( tangent from RPGIII compiler vs. Visual Basic)

You brought up some very good points.  I had training in Fortran, Cobol,
Basic, and Assembly.  No real business background or any IBM systems.
Started with a B10 in Dec 1988.  Learned CLP by debugging MapicsDB.  Self
taught RPGIII.

But I have also self studied on Object Oriented Programming.  When to use
Modules and Service Programs is a very valid question.  Well there are
several way to look at it.  Where do you want to define your business logic?
Is the same code used in multiple programs?  Will multiple users be
executing the same code from several different programs at the same time?

For example, our MICR validation routing was a program we called from Claims
Processing, A/R, and our Authorizations System.  We made it a service
program so we only have one copy to update for all three systems.  If it was
a module, we would have to update the programs in each application library.

We have one common library with all of our service programs.  We use modules
for other work such as File IO.  We perform field level updates and use this
module to do the actual file update.  The programs will read the file
directly for input only but call bound procedure to do the actual update
passing the original read data in one file based DS plus the changed file in
a second file based DS.  The module has a standard pop up window with any
errors if the same field data was changed by another job.

Hope this points you to the way of thinking needed for OOP.

Chris Bipes
Information Services Director
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----

This brings up something I seem to be struggling with.  

I'm one of those programmers someone else mentioned here who never had
much formal programming education.  I was in a clerical position in our
marketing department and responded to a job posting for a "trainee"
position doing RPG programming.  I sat down for two months with a basic
course from Manta and some slightly more in-depth courses from ATS, and
learned the basics of RPGIII, subfiles, etc.  This was eight years ago. 

...

It seems like there's plenty of information available about "how" to do
ILE, but not so much about "what" to do with it.  It's like learning to
speak a foreign language without ever visiting the place or living among
people who are from there.  You can get the syntax and vocabulary down,
but when you finally visit, your poor usage and pronunciation will leave
you nearly as ineffective at real communication as someone who never
learned any of it.  

...