RE: **SPAM** Re: Performance of ODBC vs. other access methods

Dang so PHP runs so much better on other platforms??? It runs on the i5
too...duh 


Thanks,
Tommy Holden


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:26 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: **SPAM** Re: Performance of ODBC vs. other access methods

On 9/7/06, George Kinney <GKinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Steve Richter wrote:

How much better would RPG be if its arrays
were boundless, the index could be a key value and each entry of the
array could itself contain a boundless array? It would be great, but
it takes a lot of CPU to support such a thing.

If it takes a lot of CPU to support, then why am I provided with

simple access to >such data structures on my PC via several languages:
Python, Ruby, Java, C++, >C#, etc? (even though they all call them
different names)

because the PC and Unix platforms that run those languages have the
CPU power to run them. The as400 is the only hardware platform that is
deliberately unpowered and is the only one that does not use the
languages everyone else uses.

A 'boundless' array is just a linked list, and providing keyed access

to the entries > just requires adding a hash-table to marry up the keys
with the list indicies.

here is PHP code that loads an array:
$states = array(
  "Ohio" => array( "population" => "11,353,140", "capital" => "Columbus"
),
  "Nebraska" => array( "population" => "1,711,263", "capital" => "Omaha"
))

to access the population of Ohio:
  echo "<br>population of Ohio " . $states["Ohio"]["population"]

In PHP the key can be either numeric or associative. RPG does not have
this feature because it requires more CPU than marketing is willing to
sell.

You *could* easily implement all this in ILE RPG, even though it'd be

nice if the compiler provided a couple of key words to hide the gory
implementation details.

But there really is no reason to since its been possible to implement

all this via >plain vanilla indexed physical files all along.

the problem George is it takes a lot of time and effort to create a
physical file and code the RPG to access the table by key when all you
want to do is sort a subfile.

-Steve