Re: Midrange Knowledge test

["James H. H. Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Booth Martin wrote:
> 
> Here's the obvious questions for you:
> 
> Now that you've used the cycle are you prepared to embrace its power and
> simplicity?  Was it a good experience for you? Have you used Level breaks
> and Matching records yet?  How many loops and lines of code do you guess it
> eliminated for you?

Dear Mr. Martin (et al.):

So far, I've had no reason to use anything beyond the most basic form of
"The Cycle." The two programs I've written where it's controlled by a
primary file are interactive file repair tools that "ride The Cycle" to
quickly scan through files, looking for the problems the programs are
designed to diagnose and (in most cases) repair. The less complex of the
two took a bit under a week to go from basic idea to finished tool,
display file and all, while the more complex one took a bit over a week.

My other "Cycle" programs are interactive ones that simply use "The
Cycle" as the terminal-based equivalent of the "event wait loop" found
in typical event-driven GUI and server programs.

I suspect that if I were using RPG to actually "generate report
programs," I'd probably be using the more esoteric corrollaries of The
Cycle with some regularity, but so far, I've yet to write a single
"report program" on a system that had RPG available, or to find a single
other situation where those corrollaries would help me.

And something I was groping for in my earlier diatribe: The Cycle (and
its corrollaries) are as inherent to RPG as things like the increment,
decrement, and question-colon operators are to C and Java. Asking
somebody to ignore The Cycle in RPG, just because it's unique to the
language is like asking them to ignore "++" or "-=" in C, or to ignore
the exponentiation operators in BASIC, FORTRAN, and PL/I, or to ignore
some of the higher-level MI instructions because "real" assemblers don't
have them.

Something else my "test question idea" brings up: the fact that under
OS/400, it's very easy to write a "terminate-and-stay-resident" program
that will remember data from one call to the next, within a job. Very
useful concept, and (with return statements vs. SETON LR) exceptionally
easy to do from RPG.

-- 
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante
http://www.hb.quik.com/jamesl
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