RE: Cycle programs and control level breaks

Yes.  Programmer should be aware of special characteristic of the
language that he/she is mastering in.  

In all programming languages, there are always some features/syntax that
are not recommended by most of developers of their programming
community.  

From you replies, I'm sure you are probably well aware of RPG cycles

programming are techniques that most RPG programmers try to avoid.  

So, what happen if RPG cycle programming seems to be the easier solution
for task at hand?  My answer is still avoid using it.  If there are so
many developers avoiding this techniques, there must be a easy way to
solve it without using it.  You just haven't look hard enough.  Beside,
you will probably create maintenance nightmare in the future if you use
it.  

Above, of course only apply to new program.  For an existing cycle
program, I use the rule I described in the previous email.

MHO.




-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James H H Lampert
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:11 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: Cycle programs and control level breaks

"Lim Hock-Chai" wrote:

- You are comparing a common syntax in C that a C programmer must know

to write a C program with a feature in RPG that most RPG programmers 
try to avoid.

Not at all. In both cases, if you aren't aware of that particular
language characteristic, it WILL come back to bite you.

More to the point, as a mixed-language programmer, who spent 5 years at
the University getting a Bachelor of Science degree that *required* work
in FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/I, and PDP-11 Assembler, who took electives in
COBOL and LISP, who also had 2 years of BASIC in high school, and who is
self-taught in 8086 Assembler, C, Modula-2, MI, RPG, and CL, if I know
anything about programming, I know:

SELECT YOUR LANGUAGES ACCORDING TO THEIR STRENGTHS, NOT THEIR
WEAKNESSES, AND CODE TO THOSE STRENGTHS.

If you're going out of your way to avoid The Cycle, then perhaps RPG
isn't the best available language for the problem at hand.

--
JHHL
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