Re: Cycle Processing vs. Doing it my way

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Booth,

>Procedures on the other hand are becoming a nightmare of complexity and
>impossible maintenance by mere mortals.

I heartily disagree.  To me, subprocedures are the best thing that ever happened
to RPG IV.  They *increase* readability -- dramatically -- and make programs
*more* maintainable.

>Procedures are not simple to undderstand at any level.

Again, I vehemently disagree.  Do you use any of the %BIF's in RPG IV?  Why or
why not?

User-defined procedures are verly nearly like BIFs, except you get to create it
yourself.  (I'll admit we have a few less possibilities, mainly due to lack of
full operational descriptor support for non-character fields.)

When procedures are properly constructed (including a meaningful name), they
just become a "black box" which performs its magic and returns a value.  You can
build up whole collections of useful things to put in service programs which the
most junior member of the staff can call just like the %BIFs.

A case in point would be my recommendation the other day to use a subprocedure
to calculate variance percentages.  It can hide the "complexity" of handling
zero divisors and intelligently handle overflow for the space alloted without
simple truncation of digits.  Then in the code all you do is:

      Eval      Percent = CalcPctVariance( NewValue: BaseValue: 999.99 )

I use the third parameter to tell me allowable range so I can return it when
space constraints prohibit accomodating "unreasonable" figures.  Users may need
minimal training to understand a reported variance of 999.99% is likely not the
true figure but at least alerts them it is not 2% when it should be 1002%.

I *do* think all programmers need to learn to use subprocedures (and pointers,
and APIs, and...).

My point was that, if we expect them to learn these language features to
increase their productivity, why not other language features too?  The fact that
few other languages have anything as slick as level breaks and even matching
records does not negate their usefulness.

Doug