Re: Reasons for using RPGIV

On 4/12/2011 11:35 PM, sjl wrote:

Booth -

I know you're getting old, but try to keep up here - I believe that you got
totally lost on this thread. Please re-read what I originally wrote.

I am having a philosophical discussion/argument with a fairly new full-time
employee who works for my client company. She has /never/ developed code in
free-form RPGIV, and today she expressed the belief that we should instead
be doing everything in RPG/400; essentially she is saying that there is
nothing in free-form RPG that we cannot already do in RPG/400.

---
You can always create a new program for any new functionality that would be better served by a subprocedure. But the service program binds at compile time not run time, saving object checking system routines that run in the background., authority routines and so on.

Prototyping is great. Prototype QCMDEXC with CONST and call it with a variable length command text parameter. How many RPG/400 lines does that take, with a fixed-length variable and all those TRIM operations and all that?






As to what the user sees that might be true but it takes longer. Bind the service program to the ILE service program when you compile instead of losing initialization time when one program calls another...

I expressed a strong exception to that statement, and she challenged me to
list 5 compelling reasons why RPGIV is better than RPG/400. I'm already up
to around 20 reasons, but as Jon Paris has indicated it probably will not
change her mind even if I come up with 50.

As I explained in both my OP and a subsequent post, we already have a
substantial body of RPGIV fixed-and-free-form code already in production.
The rest of the developers (except one) in the shop have been developing
applications in RPGIV/free-form code for several years, so there is /no/
"long learning" process involved for anyone but /her/ in the context of this
discussion.

- sjl


Booth wrote:
The one compelling reason for her shop to start the long learning
process involved in bringing a shop's "native intelligence" up to speed,
in my opinion, is that I suspect the software firms offering written
with non-ILE RPG are no doubt looking seriously into converting.

Her shop has every possibility of being caught flat-footed when the new
version is finally shipped.