RE: Strange behavior w/%editc() -- RPG400-L

> From: boldt@ca.ibm.com
>
> But one
> of our internal reviewers, who had much more contact with
> our customers and more knowledge of the needs of application
> programming, insisted that we should not support all the
> older opcodes.

If this reviewer also said "get rid of MOVE", I think perhaps their
knowledge of the needs of application programmers was somewhat lacking.


(culling a few points)

> Maybe some particular people aren't happy with
> everything we do, but tough!  We can't please everybody.

> Regarding your statement about RPG being the best
> language in the world for getting things done in
> limited time and limited budget, I would suspect that a
> lot of programmers around the world would argue
> differently.

> Is RPG the best for business applications?  Well, I've
> seen successful business apps implemented in many other
> languages as well.  I would argue that implementation
> language is one of the lesser factors in the success of
> any project.

Hans, I respect your work, but these statements taken together frighten the
heck out of me.  Basically, reading this one might get the idea you believe
that RPG perhaps isn't such a good language, and that the lab knows what's
good, and they're going to do it whether we like it or not.

That's certainly NOT good news for those of us who believe RPG is the best
language on the planet for development and OS/400 the best platform and
DB2/400 the best database.  You asked in your earlier post who do I want
working on my compiler, and I would have to say the number one requirement
is that the person love the language!  I don't mean love it in such a way
that you're blind to its faults, but you have to believe in the language and
what its done for the last 30 or so years - you have to have respect for its
past is order to take it into the future.

Lack of respect for the past is what makes changes in the computer industry
so painful.  To me, one of IBM's enduring strengths has always been the fact
that it embraces its past while moving forward into the future.  Backward
compatibility is the hardest thing in the world to do correctly, and the
first thing that goes when a company forgets where it came from.  I have to
stress the idea that it's the maintenance programmers who have kept your job
viable, not the leading edge users of the latest BIFs and APIs.


> It boggles my mind to think that this is THE
> most controversial issue in RPG in the past 20 years,
> when practically all other programming languages have
> been totally free form for the past 40 years!

A free-form MOVE instruction, such as Bob Cozzi suggested, would work just
fine, thank you.  Free-form is not the issue, it's the loss of that
"overload monstrosity" called the MOVE.


> That was the main reason MOVE was left
> out of /FREE - we just felt that we shouldn't have too
> many different ways of doing the same thing.

Personally, I think that's going to happen even worse now.  How many
different options did we see on this list to replace a simple MOVE
instruction?  You're just opening the thing up to a slew of interpretations.


> By excluding MOVE from /FREE, we haven't removed any
> functionality.  Practically anything you could do with
> EVALs and BIFs.

Okay.  Then I have a suggestion.

I would like to see from IBM a list of programming objectives that were
previously met by MOVE and the BIFs that they suggest to replace each one.
If you've truly reasoned your way through this, then you should have thought
about every common use of the MOVE instruction and how to replace it.

The primary ones, of course, are the data conversion techniques.  But also,
I'd like guidance on substringing and concatenation.  The BIFs being as
powerful as you say, a list like this shouldn't be too difficult to create.

With that, I'd feel a lot better about the move toward free-form.

Joe