RE: Defining a function key...

["Richard B Baird" <rbaird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Denis,
see inline, marked by >>:
---original message----
How about fresh new RPG programmer right out of school?

>>fresh out of school, even if against company standards, they should be
shown the chapters in the manuals that lists reserved words and special
indicators.

My example was to show that when people says that this or that technique is
intuitive, this is only true relative to the person past experience.

In my company (about 200 IT people, of those about 100 have to work with
RPG) most people that we hired were not seasoned RPG programmers, they came
from other platform or were very green. We've been using the AID technique
as a shoop standard for over 6 years so most of our RPG programmer are not
familiar with the *INKx technique. In fact when they have to work on old
programs that uses this technique, they always go to the closest grey hair
guy and ask what those *ink? stands for.

>>> once.   if they have to ask more than that, something is wrong with the
teacher.

Also, just curious, how do you handle other keys (enter, page-up, page-down
...). One of the thing I like with the AID technique is that I can treat
all keys the same way.

>> I usually only need one - pagedown.  i use an indicator - fully
commented.  enter is the absence of another key.
(select where, where, other, endsl - other being 'enter')

>> curious back at you:  how do you handle screen display attributes (ri,
pr) and functions (sflctl, sflctldsp, etc)?

>>>I think the aid byte is a great technique.  but it's a workaround to the
language (and can be implemented in 100 different ways, some better than
others).  I've used it in the past, just not a lot.  It's just another
technique that every RPG programmer should know about. just as they should
know about inkx.

----in another message----
<snip>
But one key point I noted in your response, and I think it is the main
problem with the ink? thing, is that those indicators could have been named
better. In fact all the different alternate technique presented share the
goal of giving a more meaningfull name than *INKC for the F3 key.

>> agreed.  if rpg was designed right in the first place, there wouldn't
have been ANY indicators - but then it wouldn't be RPG would it? :)

In my opinion, IBM should have created reserved words for them (and all
other special indicators) a long time ago.  But they didn't, and probably
won't.