Re: Advantages of RPG

James

Good point - I have a post that follows yours - was thinking about the comparison to COBOL - a business-oriented language. It has all the business-specific data types that RPG does, conceptually - maybe more in reality. The difference for me is, the terseness, the compact nature of RPG - I don't really like writing lots of big variable names - self-documenting, yes, which can be an advantage. But now you can have really long procedure names in ILE RPG.

I don't know PL/I but assume the same applies - aimed at business so it has nice things for business.

And yes, the cycle is a wonderful part of RPG - I kind of hinted at that in my other post - speaking of the origins of RPG as a report program generator, and letting the program handle IO was lovely. All the explicit stuff you have to do in C and Java - nasty!! in comparison. I dare you to smile when working with display and printer files in C!!

Vern
-------------- Original message --------------
From: James Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Really, most of what has been mentioned so far gives RPG little or no
advantage over COBOL or PL/I, because most of what has been mentioned so
far is stuff that existed in those languages long before it existed in PL/I.

I'm disappointed (but by no means surprised, given how many people
consider it a disadvantage that ought to be formally deprecated) that
nobody has mentioned *The Cycle* as an advantage of RPG. Yes, I know,
SQL also has the ability to implicitly apply something to an entire
file, but RPG had it before SQL existed, and besides, SQL hardly
qualifies as a procedural language.

--
James H. H. Lampert
Touchtone Corporation

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