Re: A different kind of persistence?

[Tony Carolla <carolla@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dane.  

<snip>
> In the time that I have been using RPG, I never realized that this was
> the way 'nomain' modules behave in an activation group.  I have always
> heard (or maybe just thought) that everything got reinitialized when the
> 'bound program' sets on LR.   This doesn't seem to get advertised a lot.
> Granted, service programs are a different story since they can be used
> 'across main module boundaries', but bind by copy was always advertised
> as more of a fancy copybook.  How very wrong that analogy is. :-)
> 
</snip>

This fact did shake things up a bit for me when I first learned it
also.  Now that I am learning about other OO languages (J-*&^), this
seems very powerful.  I mean, in a way, if you consider procedures, or
'modules' as 'classes', and then you realize that a program, in an
interactive session, may access a single copy of the 'class', which
can have static variables that remain static, or only accessible
through the 'class'  methods.  And if you bind by reference, I think
that they stay resident in the activation group, even if you call them
from other programs in the same activation group!!!

In my opinion, this sets RPG apart from other languages and platforms,
because I don't believe that you can use this type of persistence with
other OO languages (J-*&^).  Pretty cool.


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