Re: Another one bites the dust

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe,

>I'm not sure what I was thinking.  Maybe it's
>just that RPG was stable for so long, and now there's so much change.

For (too many) years there weren't any changes, so there was no reason to PTF
changes back...

>Are you sure that changes to RPG IV aren't PTFed back?

It has happened, but only rarely.  The only one I can list off-hand is the PTFs
to add support for Options( *SrcStmt : *NoDebugIO ).  And then only the compiler
changed -- SEU syntax checking was not changed so it continued to flag it as an
error.

There may be other examples, but they are the exception and not the norm.
Consider too that some RPG features you think of as being compiled into
executable code within your *PGM are really just calls to routines in the RPG
runtime support.  The back level runtime would have to change for some things
which you may not consider as being OS version dependent.

But in the larger picture, why should the compiler team have to spend some of
its limited budget on porting changes back to old releases?  I'd generally
rather they spent the money on improving the language going forward.  I'll admit
though I'm real glad they PTF'd the *SrcStmt thing back to V3R2.  The *NoDebugIO
is convienent, but the *SrcSmt is a near requirement...

>On the minus side, that means that in order to support clients I have to
>avoid the newer stuff,

No news there.  Just like you have to avoid new OS features.

>but you do that, too, so I suppose I should just quite my b*tchin'

I now generally get to code to V5R1 level, but I did live with V3R2 specs for
years.  But even that is still *vastly* superior to using RPG III.   The only
halfway legitimate reason for not using RPG IV is having to maintain vendor
supplied RPG III code.  But that begs the question why *they* haven't switched
to RPG IV...

IMHO,

Doug