RE: Assembly programmers do it a byte at a time

>> You are mixing design principles. ILE and OO are not the same, ILE and RPG 
>> IV 
>> are not the same (Vernon already stated that, rightly so), database design 
>> and 
>> OO are not the same (Relational DB and Object DB are different concepts). 
>> You 
>> do not need  OO principles to develop a programme; it is all based on 
>> functional decomposition or better: modularization. Subroutines are the 
>> lowest 
>> forms of modularization, functions and (service) programmes are the higher 
>> levels.

I apologize if I was not clear. My intent was not to say that they are all 
somehow equal. What I was saying that they all grew out of the study of better 
ways to do programming and out of that came certain software design principles. 

If I am creating a database, I am going to want to use the principles of 
normalization. If I don't, I have a mess. If I am writing a program, I am going 
to want to use the principals of functional decomposition and information 
hiding, otherwise I am going to have a mess. So and so forth. 

As far as subroutines being at some level of modularization, I see what you are 
saying but I am uncomfortable with the idea that subroutines are part of 
modularization. I still have to use them with embedded SQL rather than doing 
/Free and /End-Free all over the place but other than that, subroutines should 
be dead, dead, dead. They provide nothing that you really need to write good 
code. When we had nothing else in RPG III, that was what you had but did not 
let you do much of anything in software engineering. Makes me shudder to 
remember the days of trying to write good code in subroutines. Like living a 
long running nightmare.