Re: IFS in RPG -- RPG400-L

Hear hear Jim!

I'll reiterate what I said earlier about dates.  Why did IBM bother to have
date-type fields?  After all, I'd bet any programmer on this list who was
programming before date data types were introduced has written a routine to
do some with dates -- format, add, subtract, etc.  With all those routines
out there, why did IBM decide to come up with a date data type?

I don't know the answer, but I do know that we no longer have to waste a lot
of time writing & rewriting the same old date routines.  Say you work for
company LMN.  You write a great little IFS service program.  You use it for
5 years and forget the details.  Then you move on to company OPQ.  Guess
what?  Your contract with LMN says what you wrote while working for them is
theirs -- you can't take it with you.  Now you have to either steal that IFS
service program, or remember what you wrote 5 years ago and duplicate it. Or
IBM could make this common piece of programming, which is becoming more
common, and standardize it for us and make it part of the language.  Then
you CAN take it with you.

Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050 voice
909 522-3214 cellular
909 793-4480 fax


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Langston" <jlangston@celsinc.com>
To: <rpg400-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 2:52 PM
Subject: RE: IFS in RPG


One of the problems I face here is I'm the only program who knows how to
code to API's besides my boss.  The other 2 programmers here don't know an
API from UPS.

Yes, everyone should learn to code to APIs.  Yes, everyone should learn how
to read programs using APIs.  But let's be realistic, the one ones of us
using APIs are the ones doing the things out of the ordinary, needing to do
thing that RPG just can't do natively.  Such as the time I needed to write a
program to see what network files were waiting (ones sent with SNDNETF).  A
few questions to the list in MI, a few APIs to read directly from the object
on the disk and I had the program written.  This can pretty much be defined
in the realm of system programming.

But your normal application programmer, the ones who write the nifty green
screen interfaces to the DB2 files, wouldn't be able to make sense of this
program, nor would I expect them to be able to write one.

But, more and more commonly we need to write and read from the IFS, and it's
shifting from the realm of system programming to application programming.
This is where it needs to be simplified.

I guess what I'm saying is, yes, I use APIs, and I can write prototypes, and
it takes me longer to do than native RPG programming.  And if we want
application programmers to use the IFS we are going to have to simplify
things a bit to make it easier and faster.

As it stands, when we do need to read/write directly to/from IFS files from
RPG programs I will be writing the prototype wrappers and build a directory
and include files and etc.. etc..  And when Rochester does come out with
native IFS reading/writing I'll be able to drop the whole thing and use much
easier to use native RPG IFS File I/O.

Regards,

Jim Langston

-----Original Message-----
From: Haas, Matt [mailto:Matt.Haas@thomsonlearning.com]

<snip>
As for... "The prototypes... take up about a dozen lines and another 30
lines...".  So that's 42 additional lines, I was being generous when I said
25-30.  That just makes my point.
<snip>

But this is no different than having to put together an include file for
anything else. You only have to do it once.

<snip>
Again, I'm not saying that this is 100% necessary and should be Rochester's
top priority, I'm just saying it would make it extremely easier to code to
IFS files than currently, and a lot more people would start coding to IFS.
If I ever need to code to the IFS I'll just do the research, write the
prototypes, etc.., get code samples and do it.  So I'm looking at... 3 to 4
hours the first time I want to code to an IFS file.  If they were native RPG
it would take me, what, 15 minutes to look up the opcodes?
<snip>

If you get the code for the Redbook "Who Know You Could Do That with RPG
IV?"
(http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/9445fa5b416f6e32852569ae006bb6
5f/a555adfe471ddb288625677c006176c0?OpenDocument), it has prototypes and
constants included for most of the IFS related API's (or at least the ones
you would usually use). Chapter 5 goes into pretty good detail on how you
use them. Yes, you may spend 3-4 hours the first time you use the API's but
most of that will be reading documentation.

Personally, I don't mind using API's, they're usually pretty straight
forward to use (big exception being some of the LDAP ones), and I like the
power and flexibility that comes with them.

Matt
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