Re: Bale, Dan

Dan,

Here's your education. :)

I don't see a huge advantage for a BIF for abc < 0. If it floats
somebody's boat, then ok.

The feature that I would argue could be useful for clarity is a
figurative constant *NEGATIVE. Let me give you an example.

Consider that you might have a procedure with a Boolean return value to
indicate success (*Off) or failure (*On) . You could then code something
like:


C              If       MyProc( MyParm )
 * Perform error processing
C              EndIf

or you might

C              Eval     RtnCode = MyProc( MyParm )
C              Select
C              When     RtnCode = *Off
 * Perform normal processing

C              When     RtnCode = *On
 * Perform error processing

C              EndSl

This kind of construct works fine for 2 conditions - normal vs. error.
However, the procedure might want to return multiple conditions where
negative numbers were various error conditions, zero means new customer,
and positive numbers mean existing customer of some sort. Here's an
example of how you might do this:

C              Eval     RtnCode = MyProc( MyParm )
C              Select
C              When     RtnCode > *Zero
 * Perform existing customer processing

C              When     RtnCode = *Zero
 * Perform new customer processing

C              When     RtnCode < *Zero
 * Perform error processing

C              EndSl

I submit it might be clearer to:

D Error        S      N  Inz( *Negative )
D ExistingCust S      N  Inz( *Positive )
D NewCust      S      N  Inz( *Off )

C              Eval     RtnCode = MyProc( MyParm )
C              Select
C              When     RtnCode = ExistingCust
 * Perform existing customer processing

C              When     RtnCode = NewCust
 * Perform new customer processing

C              When     RtnCode = Error
 * Perform error processing

C              EndSl

or something like that.

Gary Guthrie



"Bale, Dan" wrote:
> 
> Gary, David, Paul, ...
> 
> Please educate me on this.  I'm having a hard time seeing the value of
> creating a BIF when a simple "If  abc < 0" will (should?) suffice.
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