Re: SrvPgms and Change Management

Greg,

If you have two different programs calling the service program you could get
different behavior than if they used modules.  You might be relying on this
behavior difference between a service program and a module.

For example lets say you've defined a file in the module and will read a
record sequentially on each procedure call in the module/service program.
If ProgramA calls the service program it gets back record 1 then if ProgramB
calls the same service program it will get back record 2.  If ProgramA and
ProgramB used the module instead of the service program then when they
called the module they would both get back record 1.  The file is opened
twice within the two modules linked into ProgramA & ProgramB instead of
opened once in the shared service program.

In your case the date conversion routine is more of a function with no side
effects from one call to another.  It doesn't really matter if it's a module
or a service program.  Making it a module just adds disk space to each
program that calls that module.  The programs are a bit bigger because they
contain a copy of the module instead of using the single copy in the service
program.

Paul