RE: Benefits of Sub-procedures

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Shannon O'Donnell
> 
> Actually, I was just thinking about this yesterday, as a matter of
fact,
> The problem that I see is that, excepting the people on these lists,
who
> obviously want to learn new, better ways to accomplish something...the
> typical RPG programmer just doesn't give a rat's _ss about learning
> something new when they can code it the "old" way in a decent amount
of
> time and still get the flock out of the office by 5.

I think it has to do with whether or not you actually enjoy programming.
Me, I still love it.  And so I try to use all the tools that Hans and
Barbara and the rest of the folks give us.  And even with my misgivings
about the backwards compatibility issues with /free, I'm using it today.
I just make sure I don't NEED the capabilities of the MOVE instruction,
and I'm fine.

There are still issues.  Not EVERYTHING needs to be converted to BIFs.
That question about incrementing an alpha field is a perfect example; it
should be done in a subprocedure, and if at all possible use a data
structure putting a zoned field over the alpha field.  I mean, use all
the tools you have!

But I really like the flexibility of procedures. I've stolen ideas I've
used in C and Java programming, and created procedures that completely
envelope my files.  I have a standard data structure that I pass to a
procedure and it returns an array of records.  I use basing pointers to
fly through the array.  It's incredible stuff.  By the time I've done
everything correctly, my mainline doesn't even know it's talking to DB2
files.

I will say this about /free: the folks who said that it's worth going to
free just to get the extra space were right on.  I apologize if at any
time I dismissed that particular argument.  By having more room, the
code is so much easier to write, read and modify.

Now I need to have the block indent feature I ad in VAJ, where you
highlight a few lines of code, hit tab, and the code is indented N
spaces (hit shift-tab to undent).  If I had that, I'd be in hog heaven
right now.

Joe