RE: Adding pointers to RPG language.

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I tend to agree.

Myself, I've used pointers just a few times, and the main thing I use them
for is for trigger programs to correctly get the before and after image of
the buffers without hardcoding a fixed offset.  Before pointers this was
very hard to do and these programs would have a tendancy to stop working
when IBM changed the layout of the return fields.

The other things I've used pointers for I believe always had to do with the
API calls or some very low level reading of objects (one program to read
NETF information directly in RPG).

I do think, however, that if I start to implement programs in RPG using
TCP/IP that I will be using pointers for that also to transverse the data
buffer, although I've yet to find a real need to write a production RPG
TCP/IP program.

Personally, I find RPG pointer use easier to use than C pointer use and less
prone to mysterious errors.  The Based mechanism makes sense once I
understood it and helps reduce the number of times I'm pointing a pointer to
a pointer instead of the data or such.

I hate linked lists myself, and although I'm sure they have their place,
I've always found some other mechanism to do what I wanted without having to
resort to them.

Regards,

Jim Langston

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Cozzi (RPGIV) [mailto:cozzi@rpgiv.com]

If we didn't have pointers in RPG IV, it would be so difficult to call
the various C runtime library functions that we've been exploiting.

I agree that if people fall into a groove of using pointers for things
like link lists, that is going too far, and an array, or multiple
occurrence data structure might be safer.