RE: What bugs you about KLISTs in RPG IV?

[Joel Fritz <JFritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott, I think we agree for the most part.  You're right about malloc(), I
should have said "NULL."

You're also right about RPG being opened up to excessive terseness, although
I think it will take a while for people who are used to RPG Classic to catch
on to the new opportunities for obscurity.<g>  I think we both agree that
maintaining code shouldn't require an exercise in cryptography.

I'm actually emphatically in favor of free form syntax.  RPG may have been
the first language I was paid to program in, but I had studied a variety of
"normal" languages at my local junior college before I got my first
programming job.  The thing that was the hardest for me about RPG was the
positional syntax.   

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Klement [mailto:infosys@klements.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 20, 1999 1:52 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: What bugs you about KLISTs in RPG IV?


Joel Fritz <JFritz@sharperimage.com> wrote:
> 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 anoth
>  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.

Joel,

I agree that there are poor programmers that write hard to read code
in C.  You seem to me to be suggesting caution in allowing the same
thing to happen in RPG, however.

In my opinion, (and apparently also in yours) someone can write
bad code in any language (and many people do!)

Therefore, lets not lose the big ADVANTAGES, and ways that code can
be made EASIER to follow by cautioning against free-form syntax.

I think if you use subprocedures that return the proper values,
you can already create code that is "too-terse" in RPG.  The
difference is that its all on the right-half of the screen, and
you can't intent it :)

And, no, malloc cannot return -1.   It returns a pointer, not
an integer!
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