RE: It's That Time Again! The 2002 RPG Enhancement Poll

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Douglas Handy
>
> I started a practice back on the S/34, where each physical file has a
unique
> 2-character prefix used in all field names for that file.  This
> helped to avoid
> name collissions since we did not have qualified DS naming.  Thus
> one file might
> have fields xxCUST and xxNAME while the next has yyCUST and yyNAME, etc.
>
> In order for EVALC to move corresponding fields, the subfield
> names must match.
> But mine never will, unless you can code something like PREFIX(
> '': 2 ) and have
> the compiler *drop* two characters from the fieldname without
> replacing them.
> Or if we had a keyword to tell it to mask or ignore a given
> number of characters
> for purposes of EVALC name matching, eg MASK(2).

Doug, another option for this, although a little less elegant, would be to
define a data structure with "common" field names for each file.  You could
then have a data structure using a based pointer with the common names
overlaying the original record, and move into the commonly named DS.  It
would mean adding and maintaining a new data structure for each file, but it
wouldn't be too huge an effort, especially since a lot of the work of
generating the data structures could be automated.

Joe