Re: What counts as technically slick?

["Nathan M. Andelin" <nathanma@xxxxxxxxx>]

Buck Calabro Wrote:
>My original question was "Are RPG IV subprocedures
>considered Technically Slick?"  I believe that the benefits
>of adopting subprocedures far outweigh the cost
>and risk.

I'd go a step further, Buck.  Modularization is a BIG key to
maintainability.  Subprocedures support modularization.  It's not that you
can't develop modular applications without them, but they lead you to it.
And the call-level overhead is much less for subprocedures than for
dynamically called programs.

One personal example.  In 1989 (before subprocedures), I wrote a couple of
programs to convert a gregorian date (mm/dd/yy) to a number representing the
number of days since a base date, and back again.  I had just started
learning RPG, and these were among my first programs.  All my programs since
that time called those 2 date routines for any date calculations.  As a
result, none of my programs were affected by Y2K.  I hate to admit this, but
it gave me a smug feeling as the hype and expense sourounding Y2K engulfed
the world.

IBM's Phil Coultard makes some excellent points about modularization in this
recent article.

iSeries Web Application Architecture:

http://www.ignite400.org/news/news2001030901.htm


Nathan.


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