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On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Joe Pluta wrote: > It's not so much the RPG as the operating system support. Two simple > examples that caused us no end of grief are OVRDBF and MONMSG. Passing > parameters from one program to another is also not an easily accomplished > task, depending on how you architect the concept of a program call. If you > do it via spawn, passing a pointer is really, really difficult. > > There are a whole bunch of others. Message files, library lists, all sorts > of things. And APIs simply add a whole new dimension. While I did say that having the ability to run RPG apps on linux would be a boon for small businesses, I agree that it would be very difficult and probably won't happen. But porting RPG the language wouldn't be as difficult. RPG apps are hard because they use a lot of non-RPG stuff, as mentioned above. But RPG the language could still be quite useful. Indeed, I believe that sometimes the OS/400 way of doing things is not that great. Consider the examples given above. I use OVRDBF all the time. But should I? I almost always use it as a carry over from the System 36 days when you had an OLC procedure with a LOAD statement, followed by various FILE statements, ending with a RUN statement. Our software still has lots of program described files that require OVRDBF. It needn't be that way. Given the chance I would rewrite stuff to not use OVRDBF. MONMSG doesn't need to even exist. In unix all programs return a value to the shell after completion, even if they end abnormally. I've only seen MONMSG used to check if some error occurred. In unix checking the exit value of the command run will do the same. Calling a program using the old OPM way is analogous to the system() function in C on unix. Variables can be passed either with environment variables (similar to the local data area) or with arguments. But this isn't really a very good way to do things, either on unix or the iSeries. These days bound procedures are the way to go. Bound procedures are just regular function calls in C and those have been around since the beginning. I can think of one instance where I've used the OPM style call in the last two years. Message files are just database files. But I really don't use them much so I better not say too much. I'm still smarting for getting single level storage mixed up :) Library lists are just a PATH. Nothing new or foreign here. All these things are really OS/400 specific stuff, not RPG. So not having them on unix would block ports of OS/400 apps because they are used so much. So I agree that it is best to run your OS/400 apps on an iSeries. But none of these keep RPG from being a language on unix. An RPG application could be written that used bash instead of CL. Just RPG without the rest of OS/400 would be very interesting and useful to have on linux. Of course the hard part would be externally described files. That and trying to get anyone to use it... James Rich james@eaerich.com
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