RE: interesting /. story on RPG

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Joe Pluta wrote:

> management.  Now, add just a few things we normally do on a day-to-day basis
> in a real application:
>
> 1. A subfile, with pageup and pagedown support
> 2. A message subfile for errors
>
> My guess is your ncurses and MySQL solution is going to become a little bit
> more difficult.  If you manage to get even close to that, add a few more
> features: SFLFOLD, popup windows, KEEP and ASSUME, and SFLNXTCHG are a few
> good ones for starters.
>
> Oh, and don't forget the support for things like CSRLOC and SFLRCDNBR.

I guess my point is that these aren't really RPG language things.  Of
course trying to write a screen file compiler would be hard and probably
stupid.  But why use subfiles and old style 5250 screens when you have qt,
gtk, motif, tcl/tk, java, mozilla, Xlib, etc. at your fingertips?  You
don't need OS/400 style screens and reports to write RPG.  RPG is good for
basically one thing:  record level access, whether that access is done
with matching records, primary files, chain, setll/read or whatever.  Some
tasks are most easily accomplished using the RPG type of record level
access.  For everything else, RPG does things as well or worse than other
languages/toolkits.  RPG on other platforms would allow other platforms to
use that strength.

Of course this wouldn't enable applications to port from OS/400 to linux,
so my earlier statements don't really apply.

James Rich
james@eaerich.com