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

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Bill,

You wrote:
>Rating the items on the entire list would be extreme.  If we were told to
>rate our top 10, someone would gripe that we should have been allowed to
>select 15.  The line has to be drawn somewhere, but I don't think any one
>item should be rated at more that 50% of our budget.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I would spend my entire $100
on Procedure overloading.  I would be extremely happy if we got that
enhancement **EVEN** if it were the **ONLY** enhancement in that release.

It's probably too late to say this but when choosing the items you want
Toronto to implement please give consideration to how much effort the
enhancement will save you.  If it saves you very little then vote for
something else.  It seems to me (based on the results of the previous
survey) that most voters choose trivial enhancements that they could write
themselves.  For example, from the current survey:

        #7 New BIFs %TESTD, %TESTT, %TESTZ -- can easily be implemented by
wrapping TEST(D), TEST(T), and TEST(Z) op-codes in a procedure.

        #19 Option to edit negative numbers -- again a procedure can
handle this.  Write it once and forget it.

Even complex items such as:

        #8 Allow dynamic resizing of arrays and MODS

        #12 Multi-dimensional arrays

can be handled by a decent set of procedures.

I suggest that our votes go for things that cannot be implemented by user
code (such as %offset, or pointer indirection, or alias support, #23, or
#31, etc.)

Other trivial things like #21, #26, #27, and #32 shouldn't even require a
vote from us because they should have been part of the original
implementation therefore they should just get done since they are design
flaws.

My point is that we should be choosing things that dramatically improve
the language and capabilities of RPG IV rather than have Toronto squander
development dollars on trivial enhancements that can be implemented by
user code.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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