RE: MI Emulator

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