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On Saturday, October 11, 2003, at 05:09 AM, Jon Paris wrote:
I must admit I find the fascination with MI hard to understand. We all
"own" the C compiler now (C++ too for that matter) - the majority of
the
useful MI functions are surfaced in the C library and in many cases
will
outperform the "native" (not that there is such a thing) MI anyway.
Just what is it that can be done so much better in MI that makes it
worth
dealing with the absence of tools, documentation, syntax checkers,
debuggers
It is not so much a case of 'better' but rather there is no other way
to do some things. The C interface to MI is somewhat sanitised. There
are some things that simply cannot be done without resorting to MI.
Even things as innocuous as creating a hidden temporary space or index
cannot be done except via MI. There aren't many business applications
that need MI but for systems stuff it is sometimes necessary.
There is a debugger. It's called STRDBG. It may not have source debug
capability (but that's another of my little projects) but it is
certainly possible to debug MI programs the same way we used to debug
CL and RPG programs. The AS/400 MI Functional Reference is readily
available and that in conjunction with the S/38 MI Functional Reference
is all that is needed. A copy of the S/38 Functional Concepts manual is
also helpful as is a copy of the multi-volume S/38 Data Areas
reference. The S/38 CPF micro-fiche is useful too. Syntax checking is
not such a big deal because the MI syntax is quite simple and
consistent.
Some things require system state (like inserting a hidden space into a
context) and although anyone with access to SST can patch a program
into system state it is harder to do that in such a way as to allow the
resulting object to be restored to another system. Doing that to an OPM
program is easier than to an ILE program.
Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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