RE: MOVE (was: /FREE RPG compiler errors)

>Buck Calabro wrote:
>> c                   move      cust          suffix
>> and then I get to find out that this is really extracting 
>> the last three characters of the customer ID, which 
>> nominally looks like "1234567-001".  In this example, 
>> it's really "substring the last three characters" and 
>> not a MOVE at all.
>
>Buck, assuming "suffix" is exactly big enough to hold the 
>suffix, use EVALR.
>   EVALR suffix = cust;

Hi Barbara!
Yes indeed.  However...

(Opinion alert!)  This seems like multiplying by 10000.01 to flip MMDDYY to
YYMMDD.  It works, but the operation hides the intent somewhat.  The "real"
thing that's happening is that I am extracting a substring.  If I were doing
this in any other language (even MI!) I would use substring.  In RPG II, I
used the I specs to effectively substring.  In RPG III with externally
defined files, *I* would have used a data structure.  Someone else used
MOVE.  In RPG IV, if I saw a MOVE I would substitute a substring.  I believe
that broadcasts the intent of the code better.

I understand the purpose of your post is to show how many of the
straightforward uses of MOVE directly map to EVAL, but I'm going a step
beyond that and saying that MOVE wasn't the choice I would have made in the
first place.
  --buck