RE: Bob's letter on V5R4 RPG stuff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Paris [mailto:Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 1:21 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Bob's letter on V5R4 RPG stuff

 >> It is very interesting to me that this got added as a language feature
over the hundreds of other things that could have been done

>The basic XML SAX support was added to COBOL in V5R3, I guess it was easier
>for RPG to pick up and enhance that than to invent something completely new
>like overloading.

>Besides - don't you think that XML support will get a hell of a lot more use
>than overloading?  Much as I'd like to have that support, XML is much more
>important at this point in history.

We need all the modern language features to be in RPG.  try finally blocks, 
data struct member functions, data struct inheritance, virtual functions, 
managed code.  As it is, I think a strong argument can be made that RPG 
programmers are stuck in a ghetto, not able to exit because very few of their 
skills are transferable to all the other languages currently used in computing. 
And the radical difference which is RPG compared to VB, C#, C++ and Java makes 
the learning curve that much steeper when programmers skilled in those 
languages attempt to use RPG.

-Steve