Re: X-Specs

[dhandy@xxxxxxxxxxx (Douglas Handy)]

Jon,

>Exactly.  I would go further and hope that the tool would perhaps use named
>indicators and the INDDS feature to even handle the screen issue.  

OK, I concede the issue on resulting indicators for I/O operations.
For some reason, my knee-jerk reaction was that legacy code would need
the indicators without thinking about immeadiately following the
operation with setting indicators (or INDDS) with the BIFs.  Guess I'm
what Dilbert calls an inDUHvidual...

>I appreciate
>that some folks would like to convert existing code to a full free-form, but I
>think that the base RPG IV is good enough.  

If the base RPG IV is "good enough", then why add CF at all?  And if
it helps keep from cooking your goose on new code, then why not when
you gander at legacy code?  (A poor attempt at a parody.)

>Let's keep the new CF "clean".

This is laudable.  I guess my secret hope was for Hans to come back
and say, "Adding CF support was so easy, we decided to PTF it back to
V3R2 for our CISC customers."  Kinda like when they added H-spec
Option() support via PTF.  (Hey, thanks again guys!)

For that matter, I'd *pay* to get CF support for my remaining V3R2
customer.  No IBM conversion utility required.  No SEU syntax checking
required.  No new BIFs required.  No new manuals and foreign
translation considerations.  No new error messages.  Just a simple
routine slipped into the parsing phase, which intercepts a CF line and
reformats it into a standard C-spec format, then passes it on as if
the source statement was coded in fixed format.  This would have
obvious limits compared to the "real" CF spec, such as the actual
expression couldn't be longer than 45 characters so it would fit in
columns 36-79 when reformatted.

But it would go a lonngg way toward helping V3R2 code, which is
unfortunately where I still need to target much of my code.  Sigh.  I
need to have this customer outgrow their CISC box

Aw, come on, Hans.  How about a V3R2 PTF?  Go ahead and make RISC
folks upgrade, but how hard is a PTF which only reformats CF to C on a
strict line-by-line basis?  Oh well, at least I tried.  Soapbox(*Off)
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