RE: free form RPG reference

Lim, Jon Paris' reference to the free-form book looks precise to your 
situation. 

Bob Cozzi took to promoting free-form in a recent article. Besides being the 
"RPG guru" that he is, he apparently had continued using fixed-form RPG for 
some years, albeit for understandably practical reasons having to do with his 
customer base.

Another link, an article by Paul Tuohy:
http://search400.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid3_gci1220190,00.html?bucket=ETA&topic=299108

Indentation for structured coding

Your names can extend past the columnar limits of fixed-formats 
---This allows more standardization of names of fields: 
---Customer_Phone_Contact_Ext)

You can code: <<  Total = Subtotal + Tax  >> without having to type Eval.

Everybody who has used it any length of time loves it.

Joe Pluta bought into it after he tried it. :)

A good reason for management has to do with the retention of good programmers. 
The best ones take to anything that really helps, at least after a look at it. 
Like when the AS/400 "hit the streets", a lot of S/36 shops at good companies 
got them just to keep their best programmers from skipping out.

And not least is that the best op codes that look forward to new requests that 
will be coming are going to go into the free-format, thank God! If your company 
sells software, so much more the reason, because, for example, they'll start 
asking whether your software dishes up secure web pages for reports, and more. 
And if not, why leave all the good stuff to the M$ programmers? Ouch! 

+================

*** Jake M: This might be out of context but does anybody know if RPG is ever 
going to be a fully free-form language like C, Java and other languages? 
cheers, Jake.

==> I'm sure of it, I've been expecting it ever since they gave us EVAL. 
(Hallelujah!) 

Does anybody remember the guy who many years and versions ago campaigned for 
free-form RPG in the midrange press? Was it Ernie Malaga? 

--Alan