Re: Python on iSeries

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 6:54 PM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, if you want everything about printing to be in your code - layout, all
that - sure, you CAN do that like this, it seems. But this is just like
having O-specs in RPG - and we've gone far past that with external PRTFs,
right?

Maybe I'm just not comfortable enough with them, but I actually don't
much care for PRTFs, and I don't consider them particularly better
than O-specs. Not in a general sense. I can accept that they have
their uses, and certainly the fancier the output, the more PRTFs
become a necessity (assuming you're not leapfrogging them by
outputting directly to PDF or something).

If you would like to amend your statement to say "we've gone far past
printed output with fully electronic output, right?" then I would be
right there with you. :)

Personally I would never want to write what you show here. But then I'm not
knowledgeable in Python, and others can speak to how good an idea this is.

I wouldn't want to write that either. To me, it's more effort than
it's worth, and the end result isn't really all that great. If you're
using Python, you most likely should either go the simple route (the
closest thing to O-specs, which would just be the print statement) or
leverage a third-party package for PDFs. And where I work, almost
everyone wants things in Excel, which makes it both easy for me and
easy for them.

I think there has been talk here about creating RPG output using Python -
that would seem a better way, IF one MUST!

Creating RPG output is indeed quite easy to do in Python. But to do
that meaningfully, you have to know some RPG, and if you know some
RPG, then it's probably easier just to either use O-specs or a PRTF
directly from RPG!

(I do use Python to generate RPG in my job, but not for printed
output. I generate "dynamic RPG" analogous to the way most people are
already familiar with generating dynamic SQL.)

John Y.