Re: Enhancements/Difference between V5R2 & V5R1

At least I can say the release brought a lot of changes in commands (112 in
V4.5, 150 in V5.1 and 227 in V5.2) but in terms of RPG, I did a small
presentation in our shop like two months ago about few of the major enhancements
in V5.2 and they were:

RPG: Conversion from character to numeric
Built-in functions like:
%DEC, %DECH, %INT, %INTH, %UNS, %UNSH and %FLOAT

Long since needed, particularly for CGI applications, these RPG built-in
functions? accept a character string for their input parameter and will convert
the numeric characters in that string to a numeric value in the format
identified by the built-in function.

RPG: New assignment operators
New assignment operators +=, -=, *=, /=, **= allow a variable to be modified
based on its old value in a more concise manner.

RPG: Bitwise logical built-in functions
%BITAND, %BITOR, %BITXOR, %BITNOT
? allow direct bit manipulation within RPG expressions. Most programming
languages have them, Now RPG does as well. %BITxxx operations allow you to AND,
OR, XOR and NOT a character or character string in good old RPG.

RPG: Complex data structures
Data structure definition is enhanced to allow:
 Arrays of data structures
 Subfields of data structures that are themselves data structures, defined with
LIKEDS. This can allow the coding of complex structures such as arrays of
arrays, or arrays of structures containing subarrays of structures.

RPG: Enhanced externally-described data structures
Externally-described data structures can hold the programmer's choice of input,
output, both, key or all fields. Currently, externally-described data structures
can only hold input fields.

RPG: Enhancements to keyed I/O
Programmers can avoid defining keylists (using KLIST and KFLD), and instead
specify their keyfields in two new ways:

1) Listing the keyfields, which can be expressions, as part of the CHAIN, SETLL,
READE or READPE
2) Specifying a data structure containing the keyfields

RPG: Data-structure result for externally-described files
A data structure can be specified in the result field when using I/O operations
for externally-described files. Prior to V5R2, this was available only for
program-described files. Using a data structure can improve performance if there
are many fields in the file.

RPG: UPDATE operation to update only selected fields
A list of fields to be updated can be specified with an UPDATE operation. Prior
to V5R2, this could only be done by using exception output.

RPG: Enhanced data area access
The DTAARA keyword is enhanced to allow the name and library of the data area to
be determined at runtime.

RPG: IFS source files
The ILE RPG compiler can compile source from the IFS, both main source files and
/COPY files. The /COPY and /INCLUDE directives are enhanced to support IFS file
names.

Maybe there are more but just to illustrate the point.  Apparently this is the
first time in years, two consecutive releases with RPG IV enhancements.

Peter Vidal
Pall Aeropower Corp.
SR Programmer Analyst
WWW.Pall.com / 727-539-8448, x2414

"A good player makes himself look good; a great player makes the team look
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