RE: DDS Support

[boldt@xxxxxxxxxx]

Richard wrote:
>Why are features added by voting?  Richard Feynman made an appropriate
>comment about the 1960s California school book selection process.  Such
>things are best done by a few smart people thinking very carefully about
the
>problem and what is needed not by a lot of relatively uninformed people
>voting.  Democracy isn't the right technique to select computer language
>features.

Richard:  I couldn't agree more!  We use the results of our
polls to give us guidance, but we still reserve the right to
make the final choice of what goes into a release of RPG.

For example, we may know of some O/S enhancement that needs
to be supported.  Or we want to move the language into a
particular direction.  In particular, in V5R1 RPG IV, there
are several items that either were not in the poll or
received very few votes.  In the latter case, we grossly
over-estimated the cost associated with one particular item,
and we believed that if we listed a more accurate cost, it
would have received much more support.  (And subsequent
discussion on this list supported that position.)

Another consideration is that people may vote for some
particular enhancement, but later analysis may show problems
with it.  For example, many people want klist's in D-Specs
(which is a bit problematical).  An alternative that seems
to satisfy the basic requirement (and seems acceptable to
many people on this mailing list) would be to allow a list
of search arguments on keyed I/O statements, rather than just
a single field name or klist name.

Regarding multi-dim arrays, I agree that it's an important
item.  I would be very surprised if it were not selected as
an enhancement for the next RPG IV release after V5R1.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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