RE: Strange behavior w/%editc()

Against my better judgement I'm responding to a plea from Joe Pluta
who called for a list of modern replacements for common business uses
of MOVE and MOVEL to prove their loss is inconsequential.

While I don't really agree that MOVE and MOVEL should have been
dropped from free-form RPG I don't miss them at all.

C               MOVEL(P) CharA          CharB
replace with:
C               EVAL    CharB = CharA

C               MOVE(P) CharA           CharB
replace with:
C               EVALR   CharB = CharA

When you see
C               MOVEL   X               Z
C               MOVE    Y               Z
it is generally doing some form of concatenation so replace with
C               EVAL    Z = X + Y
(and for those who think that MOVE is unclear regarding the data types
used tell me whether X and Y are character or numeric just from the
above line of code)

I will avoid the truly messy uses of MOVE/MOVEL involving data
structure subfields simply to perform some form of concatenation which
can generally be made much more obvious using EVAL and BIFs.

C               MOVE    Num             Char
replace with:
C               EVAL    Char = %CHAR(Num)
or
C               EVAL    Char = %EDITC(Num:X)

When you see
C               MOVEL   LongVar         ShortVar
it is generally performing some form of substring so replace with
C               EVAL    ShortVar = %SUBST(LongVar:1:%len(shortVar)
although
C               EVAL    ShortVar = LongVar
will work equally well.

The complementary operations
C               MOVE    LongVar         ShortVar
C               MOVEL   ShortVar        LongVar
C               MOVE    ShortVar        LongVar
can be handled in a similar manner but I leave that as an exercise for
the reader.

That just leaves the
        C               MOVE    Char            Num
format and there is far too much magic occuring in that simple
statement so the effect depends very much on the contents of Char.
This function is better served by a charToNumeric procedure or
possibly enhanced support in %DEC, %INT, and %FLOAT.

So, exactly what business need cannot be serviced by the above
replacements?  Exactly how are the MOVE variants clearer or easier to
code than the EVAL replacements?

Quod erat demonstrandum!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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