RE: IFS in RPG

Hi Rick!

><sarcasm alert>, what you're saying is
>that the Great Buck Calabro the GURU
>of Commsoft, and the goto guy on our list,

You will (God willing) NEVER hear me say anything so patently false.

>spends a lot of his time writing
>EDI type vendor input file prototypes.
>Don't you have a jr programmer that
>could do that for you?

Not really.  We're still recovering from our dot com bought/sold/bought/sold
again syndrome.

>or doesn't he understand the posix
>routines enough to write his own?

Well, <looks furtively both ways> if the truth be known, it's more a matter
of me being slotted into working on what I've been working on, if you get my
drift.  I'm doing switch interfaces, but other folks here are doing sockets,
and that's quite similar.

>But in my environment, I'm allowed
>to use very little of the fancy apis
>and posix routines because I'm a
>short timer - a consultant who won't
>be here for very long, and they don't
>want me to write stuff no one else can
>maintain (thier words, not mine).
>
>but if they were encapsulated in a bif or
>opcode, voila!  The heavens open,
>The sun shines through, the pearly gates appear,
>I'm in like flint!

That's a big reason for IBM to give us BIF support.  But I think it easier
to ask for standard includes and some string BIFs than to ask for the I/O
opcodes to be overloaded with even one stream file decoder/encoder.

Cheers!
  --buck