RE: Free Form RPG Opinions Wanted

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Peter Dow
>
> You keep accusing Hans of using the "beauty" argument, but you seem to be
> using it yourself.  It is unnecessary to convert an entire program to free
> form just to use a new feature.  The only reason you don't want
> to mix free
> form with fixed form is apparently because it's "ugly" (or
> "inelegant"?) to
> have the /free and /end-free in there cluttering stuff up.

Peter, there is something to be said for your argument, but most managers I
know won't want to standardize on such a mixed-mode environment, and for
good reason.  It's really a pain in the butt to switch modes during
programming, as you know if you've done any embedded SQL.  Any programmer
must know both sets of syntaxes and understand the differences.

If you had a strict set of guidelines as to which opcodes were to be used in
fixed format and which were /free, then for a short-term project, I might
consider /free and /end-free.  But for long-term shop standards it's really
not acceptable, to my mind.  I agree though, that this is the "softest" part
of my argument, and as I said in my previous post to Mr. Handy, if you can
live with a mixed-mode development environment, then the compiler team has
indeed given you everything you need.

Joe