Re: [IBMiOSS] RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 3:39 PM, Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For example, they *did* drop GOTO from free-form syntax. Are you saying

you wished they did more of that?

Yes.

Any other particular examples stick out for you? What can you do in
free-form RPG today that you wish you *couldn't* do in free-form RPG?

I think the important thing to focus on is ~why~ we'd want additional ILE
language ports. Maybe the weaknesses of PASE languages could be addressed.
For example, if we like the integrated nature of RPG+DB2, well, maybe we
should stop trying to port languages to ILE and instead fix the DB2 issues
(which holds promise given the work Tony Cairns has been doing on a variety
of OSS repos).

What do you mean by "stop trying"? Who is trying now? Other than
iSeriesPython (which frankly stopped "trying" years ago), I can't
think of any effort whatsoever to bring another language to QSYS.LIB.
To my knowledge, the only ILE languages in existence are the ones that
were rolled out right from the beginning (or very close to the
introduction of ILE, anyway).

The main weakness of PASE languages from my perspective is that PASE
itself doesn't seem to interact very well with QSYS.LIB. I had thought
this was an architectural problem (so only fixable at the operating
system level, or even deeper), but I would be happy to be mistaken.

John Y.