Re: RPG enhancement suggestion

["Scott Klement" <infosys@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colin,

The way I've always envisioned field loading is that the system loads
an entire record (or sometimes a block of records, if blocking is
enabled for the file) into a buffer.

If you're using the cycle with blocking support, it (at the proper
time in the cycle) then loads one record into another buffer, thus
making it available to the program.

The input specs would, basically, be a data structure thats based on
the same area of memory that the record is loaded into.   Therefore,
whether you only loaded one field, or loaded all of them, would not
make ANY difference in how fast the record loads.

Granted, this is only how I _envision_ it, and may not be how it
ACTUALLY works :)  But, its the way I'd do it, if I were designing
the language :)

Scott Klement
Information Systems Manager
Klement's Sausage Co, Inc.



Colin Williams <Williamsc@technocrats.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I have been writing an extract program, to bring in data from a file
>  on
> an external system. During this, a question occurred.
>
> Would file processing in RPG be a lot quicker if we could drop field
> that we weren't using, similar to the way it works when you internal
> describe
> a file, but without actually decribing the file internally.
>
> eg: if I have a typical input file with 50 fields on it, but I only
> actually use 1 field on it in the program, I would like a keyword th
> allows me to
> drop all the other fields from the file.
>
> There must be 1000's of RPG programs out there that use only very fe
> fields from files, but read in every field on the file every time a
> record
> is read
>
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