Re: Alternative to MOVEA?

["Mike Naughton" <mnaughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Barbara,

Well, I'll be flattered if I've come up with something here (but probably
I haven't!).

I'm trying to format a field for display on the screen -- if the user
enters a value that contains an asterisk, I want to fill out the field
with asterisks after that position before it's displayed again. This is
motivated as much by trying to make things really clear for
fumble-fingered users as any other real "need" to go this route, but in
this situation it seems to work pretty well.

Right now, I just define an array overlaying the field, search for an
asterisk in the field, and then do MOVEA on the array. To me, this seems,
well, just a whole lot slicker than the "for" loop. I admit that cryptic
code sometimes is hard to understand, but as a former DIBOL and VB
programmer I have come to appreciate some of the brevity that RPG/400
offered. (At the same time, I _really_ missed some of the features of
those other languages that we didn't get until RPG IV -- that was (is) a
great enhancement, and I love it. But I still like using MOVEs to put
characters into decimal fields and vice versa -- I know I could use data
structures or atol() or %EDITC, but MOVE is simple, and it works. And now
I have this MOVEA thing. . .)

What do you think? (and, thanks!)

rpg400-l@midrange.com writes:
>>Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 10:34:40 -0500
>>From: "Mike Naughton" <mnaughton@juddwire.com>
>>
>>I'm trying to join the twentieth century here and replace all my MOVEs
>>with EVALs, but this one has me stuck. If I have a 9-element array  RA
>and
>>I want to fill the last three elements with, say, "X", I can code:
>>
>>MOVEA          *ALL('X')           RA(7)
>>
>>Is there a way I can do the same thing  using EVAL?
>
>Here's one way:
>
>C           for     i = 7 to %elem(RA)
>C           eval    RA(i) = *all'X'
>C           endfor
>
>Here's another way that will probably perform somewhat better,
>if the number of elements is very large (which it's not in
>your case):
>
>D data      s             65535a    based(pData)
>D pData     s                  *
>C           eval    pData = %addr(RA(7))
>C           eval    numElems = %elem(RA) - 7 + 1
>C           eval    %subst(data : 1 : %size(RA) * numElems)
>C                       = *ALL'X'
>
>Mike, in an earlier thread, I made the bold claim that MOVEA was
>a useless opcode, now that the string builtins are so powerful.
>I challenged the mailing list to come up with a reasonable use
>for MOVEA.  Do we have a candidate here?  What's the problem
>being solved by setting those elements to 'X'?
>
>Barbara Morris



Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA  01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@juddwire.com