Re: RPG V?

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Hans Boldt <hans@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Steve's desire for pre-compiler changes is probably too late - that
window of opportunity was definitely missed as far as SQL was concerned.

Hindsight is always 20/20. A different pre-processor architecture
occurred to me long after I left RPG that would have satisfied SQL's
concerns, and offer the flexibility of the OS/2 inner/outer
architecture:

What is the problem with the current pre compiler design? Compiling
is done in "passes". Where a compiler takes its input source, compiles
the code and passes the compiled output onto the next compiler in the
sequence. The source code output of each pass/compiler is stored in
the module as a View. The debugger APIs enable the statement lines of
a view to be linked to the statement lines of the other views. Or
something like that. Conceptually I think it is a great design. ( I
wish C# had such precompiler support. ) Theoretically, you can write
your own RPG compiler. Where the input to your compiler is RPG source
code. The output is ILE C code which is passed to the C compiler. In
practice, whenever I experimented with it, the debugger view parts
never seemed to work as expected.