Re: It's That Time Again! The 2002 RPG Enhancement Poll

Hans,

Can you clarify something for me regarding enhancement #31, EVALC?

>[ ]  31  $20  EVALC move corresponding from one data structure to
>another.

I'd vote for this if it can handle my environment, but I'm not sure it will.  I
started a practice back on the S/34, where each physical file has a unique
2-character prefix used in all field names for that file.  This helped to avoid
name collissions since we did not have qualified DS naming.  Thus one file might
have fields xxCUST and xxNAME while the next has yyCUST and yyNAME, etc.

In order for EVALC to move corresponding fields, the subfield names must match.
But mine never will, unless you can code something like PREFIX( '': 2 ) and have
the compiler *drop* two characters from the fieldname without replacing them.
Or if we had a keyword to tell it to mask or ignore a given number of characters
for purposes of EVALC name matching, eg MASK(2).

I don't think I'm alone in this scenario.  Is there any way EVALC can work with
conflicting prefixes on fields?  Or can PREFIX be enhanced to allow removal of
existing prefixes?

I'll spend my $20 elsewhere if EVALC would be useless to me.

Thanks.

Doug