Re: Overloading in RPG.

[Jim Langston <jimlangston@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Unfortunately, James, this is a wish list.  RPG does not yet do overloading.

We are talking hypothetical here, introducing something other languages have.

Regards,

Jim Langston

Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!

"James W. Kilgore" wrote:
> 
> Scott,
> 
> I get what you are saying, but I also understand where Albert is coming from.
> 
> Maybe you can help get me up to speed, because I would really like to take
> advantage of this.  I can see many uses for it.
> 
> First, I think that Albert (I'm not picking on you, this is just an example) 
>and
> others have a successful paradigm that has worked for them and desire a good
> example of how they can benefit from overloading.
> 
> After reading Albert's and your postings I thought of a magazine article (or
> maybe a series of them) titled "The last date routines you will ever need" or
> something like that.  I remember at that time thinking they truly ARE the last
> thing I would WANT!  BTW, this was before date data types, but the whole 
>concept
> was a whole bunch of little routines that did something with dates supported 
>by
> another whole bunch of routines that converted your input into an agreed upon
> date format.
> 
> Under that concept, it would be normal to take your input and call one of 
>several
> routines to convert your data to the agreed upon format then call the routine
> that actually performed the desired function.  Oh, I almost forgot, then you
> called another routine to convert the results into the format you wanted to 
>work
> with.  And if the format of your input changed, well ... go fish ;)
> 
> Now here is where I'm lacking on education.
> 
> Let's say I want to write GetCustInfo and I want to pass a name (alpha) or a
> customer number (11,0S) or a phone number (also 11,0S).  I still wind up 
>writing,
> and using within my program, GetCustInfoByName, GetCustInfoByNumber,
> GetCustInfoByPhone or do I just write GetCustInfo(NAME:keyedName) or
> GetCustInfo(NUMBER:keyedNumber) and GetCustInfo(PHONE,keyedPhone)?  Or can I
> write GetCustInfo(keyedName) GetCustInfo(keyedNumber) and 
>GetCustInfo(keyedPhone)
> and GetCustInfo can by divine province tell the difference?  Now each customer
> has a unique number, but I may have more than one ACME in my list.  So get by
> name has to be able to return a list of possibilities if there is more than 
>one
> or just the info if there is only one.
> 
> Again this may be a bad example.  But a true, real world, working example 
>would
> help a whole bunch for me.
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