[MI400] RE: MI Emulator

["Richard Hart" <richhart@xxxxxxx>]

This is another comment to Jon Paris' question (perhaps rhetorical), "why the 
interest in MI?"  Might as well pile on too.

First, it's fascinating, as Leif said in his book.  I don't have a C compiler 
on my E04 here at home, but I do have the MI translator built right in 
(QPRCRTPG).  So I can play around with it to my heart's content.

Second, it can be very useful in ways that the MI functions accessible from C 
cannot, as of this writing anyway.  For example, the ADDSPP instuction is not 
currently available as a built-in, evidently (no "_ADDSPP").  I have a tool to 
display the fields in a file using information in a User Space loaded by 
QUSLFLD.  It is convenient to access this space with pointers, but now do I 
access any byte past byte one...seeing that V3R2 RPG does not have pointer 
arithmetic capability?  Simple, just write a little MI program that executes 
ADDSPP and call it.  Yes, there are other ways (SETSPPO is, I think one, which  
i s  available from a built-in, or so I believe).  But again, using that 
requires some MI knowledge.

Third, you might just as well turn the question around:  why  i s n ' t  there 
more official good MI documentation from IBM? (not profitable, perhaps).  But 
why give us a  l i t t l e  information in the System API reference manual in 
the QPRCRTPG section, a little more in the System API Programming manual, and 
some rather cursory information in the MI Run time library for C manual?  Why 
not actually create a manual that would really let a beginner, maybe a student 
in a college, learn something neat?

Oh well:  what do I know?

Rich Hart in Okie City