RE: Another RPG Suggestion

[Colin Williams <Williamsc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Its basically 'cos I like to use LIKE wherever I can, and base  my work
fields in a program on the relevent database fields. 

If i'm doing a CAT or SUBST, I need alpha fields, so any numerics must
have fields explicitly defined for them, which is not ideal for
maintenance
purposes.


-----Original Message-----
From: boldt@ca.ibm.com [mailto:boldt@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 1999 3:24 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Another RPG Suggestion




Colin wrote:
>Sorry to ask,
>
>but how about the the ability to define one field LIKE another in the D
>spec, but with the additional ability of changing the
>DATATYPE and LENGTH,
> as you can do in DDS.
>
>I think this would be another feature that would save a lot of code
>crunching.

Don't apologize!  This has been on our "proposed enhancements"
list for a while.  Currently, you can change length on a D-Spec
LIKE, but you can't change format.

Regarding changing data type, I'd like to know more about
what you really want.  In particular, are you primarily
interested in defining a numeric field like say a zoned
decimal field and change the format to packed?  Or do you
need to define a character field like a numeric field?

Also, what coding scenarios would be made easier by this?

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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