RE: RPGIV: RPGIII to get a facelift?

[Colin Williams <colin.williams@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reeve

It's the Programming Police. Your right, they should move everything over to
/FREE and get rid of the /FREE, /ENDFREE tags.

To get over the lack of goto's for display file processing, I use the FOR

Eg:

FOR I = 1 to 1

        if x = true
                leave
        endif

ENDFOR 

Works fine!

cheers
Colin.W
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Reeve [mailto:rfritchman@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: 26 October 2004 08:15
To: rpgiv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: RPGIV: RPGIII to get a facelift?


I think IBM should focus 100% of their efforts on completing /FREE. 
Until RPG is a completely free-form language, it's incomplete and it does
nothing to bring new recruits into the fold.  I've talked with several
"older" programmers who feel no need to move to /FREE because H, F, D, and O
specs are still fixed-format.  Younger programmers just turn their nose up
at the current neither-fish-nor-fowl /FREE implementation.

Seeing a moderately contemporary progam littered with /END-FREE and /FREE is
more than moderately annoying.  I can use my service program library to
handle MOVE issues (and others) but the lack of a free-form GOTO/TAG is a
burr under my coding saddle.  My standard structure for handling a rich
mixture of command keys, help panels, and lookups is not well-suited for the
glib suggestion in the Reference manual to "use other operation codes, such
as LEAVE, LEAVESR, ITER, and RETURN" instead of GOTO.  Is there a technical
reason GOTO and TAG can't be free-formed?  Or is this the Programming Police
in action, telling us a complex set of nested loops for flow control
promotes program readability?  I'm thinking about my customers' junior
programmers trying to make sense out of Nested Loop Soup.

Like most of us, I spent a lot of time in non-/FREE code, and I'd like to
convert it to /FREE without rewriting it.  It's well-structured code (not
spaghetti); then I use CODE (i.e. leave WDSC, hop into CODE) to convert it,
and it gets ugly with /END-FREE and /FREE from dealing with the unsupported
op codes.

We have a tool, /FREE, to cut through layers of to-do lists.  It would be a
better tool if it were sharper, and charging for the rusty blades of old,
less efficient tools doesn't serve any purpose other than to annoy the small
number of customers requiring the facility for program maintenance.

-reeve


On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:22:28 -0500, Bob Cozzi <cozzi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I spent one day at COMMON last week and talked with several of the IBM 
> Canada RPG IV developers.  One of the questions that was asked was if 
> IBM could/should start charging for the RPGII and RPGIII compilers 
> (some people call RPGIII, "RPG400").
> 
> Anyway, I suggested that IBM should enhance RPG IV with two new 
> features:
> 
> 1) Allow blank lines in the source code
> 2) Support the compiler parameters in the H spec, and translate those 
> parms when the CVTRPGSRC command is used.
> 
> Without leading your responses: I'm wondering if you feel charging for 
> RPGIII would help/encourage you to move to RPGIV more aggressively?
> 
> -Bob
> 
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