RE: Request for CL, DDS, SQL RPG enhancements

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rob,

I've coded CL type programs in RPG, and even though I wrote them and used
the latest and greatest ILE concepts the code is just plain not easy to
understand, even for me and wrote the darn thing!

DSPFD (&Library/&File) ... blah blah

is very explicit and very easy to debug .vs.

a CallP with a parameter that I have to go searching for what the parameter
is set to, sometimes as a constant in the D specs, some times in code, etc..
I now have 2, or more, lines of code to do the same thing I can do with one
line in CL.

I do agree, that RPG would probably be much faster.  And if I needed speed,
I would do it in RPG.  But for a nightly process I'm not that concerned
about speed, I am much more concerned that the programmers who follow me be
able to maintain this code.

You don't know how many times I've been in shops where they want me to write
a utility, someone else had written it a few years ago but no one knew how
it worked or could find the source, etc..  Rewrite it from scratch please...

I believe it is quoted that 80% of a programs time in coding is in
maintenance, not original programming.

I already have some utilities on this box that use semi-advanced features
(ODBC links, VA-RPG, data queues, file triggers, etc...) that only one of
the other programmers (out of 3 more) has a concept of, and he's the CIO.
If someone else is asked to maintain any of this they are already going to
have to do a lot of learning to find out what this code is doing.

So, in my case anyway, faster is not always better, simpler is almost always
better.

Regards,

Jim Langston

-----Original Message-----
From: rob@dekko.com [mailto:rob@dekko.com]

I don't agree that it would be harder to maintain what was going on.  Yes,
someone might have to learn something new - is that so terrible?  But the
api's involved are some of the simplest.  And I knew people that couldn't
grasp the concept of a chain or a setll, they actually read every record
of the file looking for the one they wanted.  Would you think it
unreasonable for them to learn something new?  Neither do I.  The API's
are well documented.  And I often put comments in my code going straight
to the web site with the documentation on that API.  Granted, the way IBM
moves their web sites around can frustrate some of your links.

A straight RPG method, using API's would definitely blow the doors off the
CL method as far as performance goes.

And doing a DSPFD to either print outs or to an outfile are subject to the
whims of IBM and may change format with each new version of the OS.

Rob Berendt