RE: CF-Spec - another call for opinions

["John Taylor" <john.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Collin Williams wrote:

> One the AS/400s main strengths is its compatibilty across releases. Are
> you saying that idea is a bad thing?

Not at all. What you are talking about is object compatibility. That is not
in question here. We are discussing source compatibility.

You cannot take an RPG II program, change the source type to RPGLE and
compile it successfully. You need to run it through a converter first.
Similarily, you could have a converter for free format RPG that could check
for naming clashes.

Just take a look at what happened with the Swing classes in Java 1.2. It was
a pretty significant name change that occurred, yet the conversion tool(s)
provided reduced it to a minor inconvenience for the programmer.

Finally, who is going to be doing a mass conversion in the first place? I
jumped on the ILE bandwagon as soon as it was released, yet I still haven't
converted most of my RPG/400 programs. I use ILE/RPG4 mainly for new
application development. I would handle the free format RPG the same way.
Why convert perfectly usefull legacy programs unless there is a good reason
to do so.


Respectfully,

John Taylor

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