Re: Sources for External Data Structures

John Carr CDP wrote:
> Joe
> I don't think Hans (or anyone in Toronto) can help you much with that one.
> DDS is "Owned" by Rochester.  And they don't make any money off DDS by
> itself.  The same is true of the CL language.  If it were up to Hans &
> people like him at Toronto we would have had those things before now.
>
> Its my personal opinion Hans could have put Subroutines & Data Structures
> in CL by himself on his lunch hour.
>

Hmmm, enhance CL or lunch, enhance CL or lunch...  Oooh!  Donuts!  :-)
Sorry John, my stomach wins out every time!

> I believe thats how we got the logical ANDxx & ORxx in the RPG language
> by the way.  (ain't dat rite hans?)

Yeah, that's about right.  That was a long time ago, about release 6
of S/38 RPG III.  We weren't planning much for the release other than
bug fixes.  At the lab, we had some education sessions on compiler writing
taught by some U of Toronto profs.  In one class, the prof discussed code
generation for short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions.  I tried
this out on my home PC (an ancient 8088 machine) using assembly language
macros.  I then realised that the same technique could be easily done in
the RPG III compiler.  After some playing between APARs, I went to my
manager and said that we should add ANDxx and ORxx opcodes to the language.
He said that we didn't have the resources to do this kind of enhancement.
I pulled out a couple of listings and showed the working code to him!  He
couldn't say no any more!  (Thanks for the opportunity for me to tell that
story again!)

John, you and I both know that coding is just one small part of the whole
software development process.  We also have other stages, such as gathering
requirements, high-level design, unit test, component test, system test,
rewriting manuals, messages, etc.  Not to mention addressing customer
complaints after we ship a release!  There are lots of things we'd like to
add to the language, some of which could probably be coded over lunch.  But
it's the other things, especially testing, that limit what we can do in any
one release.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, hboldt@vnet.ibm.com

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