Re: Passing Parms -- RPG400-L

Isn't this a lot easier than tracking down all the programs that would need
lines of code changed, too?

Why not make the recompiles unnecesary? Wouldn't that be less/easiermaintenance? I suppose you enjoy mass-recompiles?

Suppose you have 50 computers to deploy the changed program on. Now youhave to find out, on each computer, which programs call the one you'vechanged, and you have to recompile/replace them all. And this all has tobe done while nobody is using any of them. Isn't that a lot of work?

What if those computers aren't all under your control. What if you sellsoftware to (for example) cleanse an address. The client has writtensoftware that calls your program from their own code. Now you change/adda parameter to your program, and you have to ship out a new copy to everycustomer, along with a new copy of the file that the ext data structure isbased on, and get every customer to recompile all of their programs thatcall yours.

Because of this, people will resist installing the update. They'll put itoff. In the mean time, you have to support bugs in the new version ANDthe old one because the customers need time to make the changeover.

You could've eliminated all of this simply by making it so that thecalling programs DON'T NEED TO BE RECOMPILED. And that's much easier to dowith single parameters than it is with data structures.

Furthermore, since single parameters are all independent of one another,you can lessen the impact of changes so that it affects fewer people ifyou use single parameters.

I realize that not all of the things I've listed here apply to everyonewho writes programs -- but you haven't listed a single reason why datastructures work better. Indeed, your only argument so far was for usingexternally defined fields for parameters! That can be done with singleparameters as well as data structures.

You still haven't told me why data structures are easier to maintain! Howdo they make maintenance easier?

The advantage to data structures is that you can group fields togetherwhen they belong to a "set" of fields. For that, data structures arebrilliant. It's exactly what they're intended for.

But simply passing all parameters as data structures as a rule of thumbdoesn't make any sense to me.

I ought to say this:  as with so many things, there is no single right
solution.  creating a data structure for one parm in a standalone
application would seem silly.  Using the data structure is just one more
bullet in the programmer's gun belt, imho.

The question is: if he uses that bullet, will he shoot himself in thefoot?