RE: RE: What bugs you about KLISTs in RPG IV? -- RPG400-L

Scott:

I think you missed the phrase "nut behind the wheel" in my posting.  What I
was trying to point out was that some C programmers exploit the language's
potential for terseness in a way that does nothing to improve the
application's performance.  Pointers and memory management are another area
all together.  If you use dynamic memory allocation, you have to manage
memory yourself (malloc() can return -1, right?) and it's not easy.  We now
can make memory management mistakes in RPG.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  I've written bad code in RPG,
PASCAL, C, C++, BASIC, FORTRAN, 8086 Assembler, and I'm learning to write
bad code in Java. 

The real secret to writing bad code is dedication and just plain hard
work.<g>  You can do it in any language and I think I've contributed a lot
to proving it. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Klement [mailto:infosys@klements.com]
Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 11:36 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: RE: What bugs you about KLISTs in RPG IV?


I feel that you have a a good point, to an extent, about the value
of making code easier to follow.

HOWEVER...
There are many times that spreading code over multiple lines actually
makes it MORE DIFFICULT, to follow!

A really good example of this is nested IFs, DOs, SELECTs, etc.
In a free-form language, you can indent to clarify these things...
to me that makes it much easier to read, debug and maintain.

Also, I wonder why you're attacking C?   Although its possible in C
to make code hard to follow, its ALSO EASY TO DO IN RPG.

Indicators make it easy to make bad code.  How many legacy programs
have you tried to work on where the output specs have as many as 4
lines of ANDed and ORed indicators?!   Or indicators that are set on
and off based on another group of indicators, that then affect other
things in later iterations of the cycle?

GOTO is another bad culprit.  Of course, you can do this in both
RPG and in C, but I find it much harder to avoid in RPG.

And since you mentioned pointers and memory management, I'd like to
add that you can do the same things in RPG that you can in C.   Of
course, RPG programmers don't do this very often because they're
new to the whole concept, but that won't be true forever...

And you can also let the compiler manage your memory, etc, in C just
as you can in RPG!

I think this boils down to whatever the programmer is accustomed to...
If you're used to RPG, its better...  if you're used to C, its better.

Lets remember that C is the most widely used language in the world.
RPG doesn't even rate its own area on Yahoo.  :)


Joel Fritz <JFritz@sharperimage.com> wrote:
> Seems to me that the big problem with C (as far as maintainability a
> readability, we won't talk about pointers and memory management) is
>  nut
> behind the wheel one.  It's what I call the vice of terseness--the
>  desire to
> compress the largest number of program instructions into the smalles
>  amount
> of source even when being more verbose would create executable code
>  that
> looks exactly the same as the terse version.
>
> I like the free form idea, but I wouldn't mind being protected from
> terseness abuse.
>
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