RE: CL improvements

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:04 11/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Forgive me for being a killjoy here, but do we REALLY NEED these sort of
>enhancements in CL? Subroutines? FOR loops? I'd much rather IBM focused
>its' efforts elsewhere. 
>

Tim I guess at first glance these requirements may seem a little
extravagant, aand you are probably thinking that this will just have
non-programmers creating complex hard to maintain  program in CL doing
things it wasn't really meant to do.

I think the enhancements would be damn handy, especially after trying to
support machines that don't have an RPG or other compiler. It would wipe
out some of the uglier CL.

Secondly, people are going to do this stuff in CL anyway. Sometimes it's
just the "right" place to do it. I usually think about whether I'm handling
data or objects to determine whether the program I' going to write should
be CL or RPG. Unfortunately, because CL doesnt support a lot of things
*especially subroutines* I end up writing convoluted code in either CL or RPG.

I do realise that the API's can get around some of this stuff, but that's
*some* not *ALL*. Maybe having a whole lot of ILE CL procedures tied to RPG
programs is a better way to go, I don't know. I haven't quite got around to
dabbling with this yet.

Bottom line for me is, if CL is used as a programming language (and it is)
then it ought to have some structured language features so people don't
write a bunch of crap.

To quote a line in many of the longer threads I've seen lately in the RPG
list: "you don't have to use it in your shop if you don't like it" ;)

Cheers
Evan Harris

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