Re: Another one bites the dust

Timing is everything. In fact, I'm talking about this very topic
in next weeks "midrange developer" newsletter.

Bob Cozzi

On Sat, 19 Oct 2002, Douglas Handy wrote:

>
> Joe,
>
> >I'm not sure what I was thinking.  Maybe it's
> >just that RPG was stable for so long, and now there's so much
> change.
>
> For (too many) years there weren't any changes, so there was no
> reason to PTF
> changes back...
>
> >Are you sure that changes to RPG IV aren't PTFed back?
>
> It has happened, but only rarely.  The only one I can list
> off-hand is the PTFs
> to add support for Options( *SrcStmt : *NoDebugIO ).  And then
> only the compiler
> changed -- SEU syntax checking was not changed so it continued
> to flag it as an
> error.
>
> There may be other examples, but they are the exception and not
> the norm.
> Consider too that some RPG features you think of as being
> compiled into
> executable code within your *PGM are really just calls to
> routines in the RPG
> runtime support.  The back level runtime would have to change
> for some things
> which you may not consider as being OS version dependent.
>
> But in the larger picture, why should the compiler team have to
> spend some of
> its limited budget on porting changes back to old releases?
I'd
> generally
> rather they spent the money on improving the language going
> forward.  I'll admit
> though I'm real glad they PTF'd the *SrcStmt thing back to
V3R2.
>  The *NoDebugIO
> is convienent, but the *SrcSmt is a near requirement...
>
> >On the minus side, that means that in order to support clients
> I have to
> >avoid the newer stuff,
>
> No news there.  Just like you have to avoid new OS features.
>
> >but you do that, too, so I suppose I should just quite my
> b*tchin'
>
> I now generally get to code to V5R1 level, but I did live with
> V3R2 specs for
> years.  But even that is still *vastly* superior to using RPG
> III.   The only
> halfway legitimate reason for not using RPG IV is having to
> maintain vendor
> supplied RPG III code.  But that begs the question why *they*
> haven't switched
> to RPG IV...
>
> IMHO,
>
> Doug
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