RE: Adoption of new RPG techniques

[Terry@xxxxxxxxxx]

(stupid spellchecker...)  That post was supposed to conclude:  'Sparingly
at best.'

Terry Richardson
Vermont Information Processing, Inc.
terry@xxxxxxxxxx


                                                                           
             Terry/VIP                                                     
                                                                           
             08/05/2003 03:47                                           To 
             PM                        RPG programming on the AS400 /      
                                       iSeries <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>     
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                                                                   Subject 
                                       RE: Adoption of new RPG techniques  
                                       (Document link: Terry)              
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           



Joe / Aaron--

I somewhat reluctantly step into this fray...

While I don't agree with everything Joe says on these fora, I must agree
with him here.  At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I too find the
free form code MORE difficult to read, especially when in a source member
with embedded SQL and fixed-format calcs.  A member littered with /exec
/end exec, /free /end free is just about the homeliest thing you can find.

Aaron, in the real world, where maintenance of existing code is where a
bulk of the effort is expended, you really have to make your code easy for
others to follow.  It's absolutely essential.

Now I'm not advocating a return to left-side indicators and all that fun
stuff, but clean, structured, column-oriented code is plenty easy for
anyone with any RPG experience to follow, debug and modify.  Until someone
can show me the real advantage of using free-form coding, (REAL advantage,
not just "pretty" indenting and absence of EVAL) I'll probably use it
sparingly at most.

Terry Richardson
Vermont Information Processing, Inc.
terry@xxxxxxxxxx