Re: What good is ILE?

Funny, the reason I first used RPG IV was for the longer file names -- I had a customer that used mainly COBOL and all their files were using full 10-character file names. I could've used them with RPG III by doing file overrides at compile time, but why make it harder for the next programmer?

That was a toe in the water, and after that, the bifs and procedures and long field names were great reasons to jump on in and start swimming.

--
*Peter Dow* /
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050
petercdow@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:petercdow@xxxxxxxxx>
pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>/

On 2/4/2013 9:49 AM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

We recently had a presentation at our local user group on ILE:

http://bit.ly/TQEjM4

At the end of the presentation, the RPG III programmers in the room were saying how glad they were that they didn’t have to mess with all the new concepts and techniques. I was actually beginning to see their point.

One thing that drives IBM i programmers to ILE is the adoption of a Web development framework. Scott's open-source initiatives and others are good examples. Then once you get into it, there's no turning back; just moving forward.

Linkedin polls may not be representative of the community at large, but 85% of RPG programmers indicated that they were using service programs.

Procedure return values is one of my favorite features, i.e. number = random(from:to);

-Nathan.

________________________________
From: w 4038 <window4038@xxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Use this to send questions <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 6:17 PM
Subject: What good is ILE?

What good is ILE??

Before ILE, if you needed to call program B from program A, a simple CALL statement did the job.
All you had to worry about was the library list and it was up to you to pass parameters correctly.

Then IBM introduced ILE.
Now you can worry about, Activation Groups,Binding Directories, Binder Language, subprocedures, service programs, Static Binding, Dynamic Binding, Bind by Reference and some I can't recall right now.

Sure, it's nice that the compile checks to ensure that passed parameters match, but what other benefits are there? The benefit isn't speed. Newer hardware resolves that.
All the complexity just increases the potential for coding errors.

So I ask great minds of the Midrange List, what good is ILE?