Re: Goodbye Old Friend - CODE400

About 8 years ago (more or less), I spoke with Violaine Batthish
regarding this. (It was at a COMMON Conference--either in Minneapolis or
Indianapolis. I don't recall for certain.) She saw the need for
something that would be simpler than full-blown Eclipse/Java plug-ins. She
had worked with the developers and powers that be--she shared that id
didn't look like REXX macros would ever be supported. There was a
possibility to have something easier for most people to do than Java, but
I've never seen anything come of it.

While REXX may not get supported, there is a legitimate requirement here.
Perhaps a DCR for that would kick-start or re-start the effort.

I know I wrote a couple REXX macros back in CODE, but I don't know that I
would remember much anything about how they worked.

wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 03/11/2011 02:21:02 AM:

----- Message from "Mark S. Waterbury" <mark.s.waterbury@bellsouth.
net> on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:20:56 -0500 -----

To:

Rational Developer for IBM i / Websphere Development Studio Client
for System i & iSeries <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject:

Re: [WDSCI-L] Goodbye Old Friend - CODE400

Hi. Buck:

I suggest that you all need to open a DCR (Design Change Request, aka.
"enhancement request") for RDi / RDp, to tell IBM they need to add
support in the editor for REXX macros. After all, this WDSCi, RDi or
RDp is supposed to be the replacement for CODE/400 ... is it not?

That's my opinion.

All the best,

Mark S. Waterbury

> On 3/10/2011 12:57 PM, Buck wrote:

On 3/9/2011 1:00 PM, John Larimer wrote:

I think the time has finally come. We upgraded our machine going to

IBM i

v7.1 from v5r4 and CODE400 can't verify newly introduced features in

RPG.

I've been using CODE400 daily since about 1999.

I've made several attempts transition to WDSC/RDi/RDp, all failures.
Today I am on RDp 7.6.0.

There are two things always bothered me about this tool compared

to CODE400.

No support for extending the editor like we could with REXX Macros. I
created a fairly significant library of macros and found that the

most

useful and productive were based off of the IBM supplied FIELDS

macro. My

macros looped through the resulting field definitions generating code

for

D-Specs (work fields, structures and so on), C-Specs (comparing

fields to

work fields, moving data to/from work fields) and generating various

types

of SQL statements. These macros saved me huge amounts of time and

reduced

keying errors.

A kindred spirit! I salute you. For what it's worth, I have been
current on the GUI IDE product up until Rational began charging for

it,

so I'm hovering on WDSC 7.0.0.8 against i/OS 5.4 for the time being. I
dearly miss macros. I played with the Eclipse Monkey project (now
defunct) but without knowing the guts of Eclipse and Lpex as it were,

I

made very little progress.

I must tell you that not only is Code/400 still on my Windows 7

machine,

I still use it specifically for the macro capability. Rexx is WAY
EASIER to write and debug for macros than anything I've tried with
Eclipse. Apparently, Eclipse-using developers aren't interested in
macros. You'll find there are the merest handful of IBM i developers
who are interested in macros.