RE: Consider the origins (was Re: INZSR weirdness)

And now for the Trivial Pursuit question:  What does RPG stand for?  Report
Program Generator!

Rick Weber  |  TOYS 'Я' US International 

-----Original Message-----
From: James H H Lampert [mailto:jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 10:54 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Consider the origins (was Re: INZSR weirdness)

rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
. . .
> Many of the people who argue against it would probably 
> like it if it just came out.. . . wizards. . . .  In fact, 
> that's about the best comparison - a wizard.
. . .

Rob, you nailed it.

RPG was not, at its origin, a programming language. It 
originated as a band-driven report generator. The same 
sort of band-driven report generator that's built into 
things like dBase and so forth. In effect, a primitive 
form of "wizard." The only reason why it doesn't look much 
like a band-driven report generator is that it was 
developed back in the Hollerith card era, and so it HAD to 
be syntactically structured as a language that would fit 
in 80 columns.

It was given an absurdly concise syntax like that of no 
programming language ever devised, yet one that anybody 
who knew how to wire a plugboard for a unit record machine 
would instantly and instinctively understand.

The S/3, the AS/400's first recognized ancestor, was 
developed as a replacement for plugboard-programmable unit 
record machines. That was, after all, what IBM Rochester 
had been told to do: to develop a better unit record 
machine, not a smaller competitor for the mainframe 
computers IBM was selling. So RPG, with its bizarre syntax 
was a natural, since the job of writing software could be 
easily handed to the mailroom kid who knew how to wire 
plugboards.

--
JHHL