RE: Hmmmm.....$1 Billion -- MIDRANGE-L

I don't understand your distinctions here. In event-driven, you say the user 
tells the program what to do. Of course, the developer gives the user a limited 
number of options. At every level there is some limit - the number of 
applications you have on your PC, the number of documents open, etc. To use 
your words, a program always "tells a user what to do", or at least offers the 
limited number of choices available at the time.

But, as someone else said in this thread <bg>, an RPG main line with WHENs 
based on *INxx can be seen as event-driven according to your definition. The 
user goes where he/she wants, according to the needs of the moment. That's as 
event-driven as a Windows app with command buttons and menu items. I mean, you 
can even get drop-down menus in DDS if you want to.

It is not the cycle that forces you into something procedural. And, anyway, 
portions of all code are procedural for awhile. Nothing is completely random - 
that would be useless.

In the realm of both OO and event-driven, I like to think that many of us have 
thought in these ways for years before they were coddified <g>. Now we have 
languages that support the concepts explicitly - vefore we had to write our own 
control structures - virtual call tables could be written and have been at our 
relatively high level, but it's a lot easier to let the C compiler take care of 
it. But someone has to do it at some level.

Again about the ycle, if you use primary and/or secondary files, yes, you will 
be forced into a particular order of things - even there you could branch out. 
But so-called full-procedural (might be a misnomer, come to think of it) files 
or only DSPFs allow for much flexibility.

OTOH, sometimes you WANT to force a particular order - dependencies also exist.

JMHO
Vern
-------------- Original message -------------- 

> Not being a C/S guy, I may be wrong, but my belief system is this: 
> 
> A procedural program has the characteristic that the program tells the 
> user what they can do in the order the program wants; in an event 
> driven program, the user tell the program what to do in the order the 
> user wants. That's why people are talking about a loop in this thread 
> (no pun intended). A loop that waits for 'something' to happen and the 
> program keeps processing. Unlike a procedural program where the program 
> stops processing and waits for input from the user. 
> 
> The RPG logic cycle is just a way of implementing a procedural program. 
> It will wait for user input and the program tells the user what to do. 
> The only advantage of the logic cycle is that it would automatically 
> (no additional code needed) read and write files and perform level 
> breaks. The disadvantage is the extreme lack of flexibility. 
>