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I have been trying to think of the pros & cons of free form vs fixed form. Personally I would prefer to use free-form. However, trying to be fair and balanced, I was trying to think of arguments as to why we should not move to free form. I can't think of any. Does anybody have any views on why a move to free-form is not a good thing?
The primary advantages to free-format are:a) It makes it much easier to work with longer expressions, longer variable names, longer subprocedure names, qualified DS names, nested DS names, etc.
b) The ability to indent code to make it easier to read. (Though, there are ways to improve readability without doing this, and ways to view source code indented even in a fixed-format language.)
The advantages to fixed-format are:a) You can continue to use opcodes that IBM didn't provide in free format. MOVE and GOTO are the primary ones. (Though, GOTO is not needed if your code is written in a modular fashion, and MOVE can be replaced with EVAL and BIFs in V5R2 -- in V5R1 there are things the BIFs can't do easily, so you may have to stick some fixed-format code in a subprocedure.)
b) Syntax checking is a little bit better in the source editors. (Though I haven't found it to make much difference for me.)
c) Traditional RPG programmers are used to fixed format and comfortable with writing and reading it. Many of them are not comfortable with free format. (Though, once they've used free format for awhile, they'll feel differently.)
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