Re: Converting RPG to RPG ILE

Joep Beckeringh wrote:

...
Sometimes overflow can be harmful, but is easily repaired afterwards: I
once used too small intermediate fields in a currency calculation,
loosing 6 million Dutch Guilders (appr. 3 million dollars) in the
process. Luckily it was RPG III, so the process completed normally. The
next morning the customer immediately spotted the deficit; they repaired
the database with a few corrective bookings and I repaired the program.
Had the program stopped at the overflow, I would have had to clean up a
half completed invoice process. Believe me, that would have been a mess.

So, overflow can be dangerous and stopping with an error is a sensible
default action to take. But I think it was unfair that, until MONITOR
was introduced, it was the only possible action and that there was no
way for a programmer to deal with it other than delving into condition
handlers. Just EVAL(E) would have done the job nicely.

But since there _is_ now a more granular way to handle exceptions, it
seems to me that going to RPG IV is a good opportunity to discover and
clean up the kind of overflow errors you describe.

Getting the exceptions after the new version has gone into production 
would be annoying, but doing a conversion to RPG IV is just like any 
other change to an application.  You test the change, and put it into 
production.  And no matter how hard you try and how wonderful your
testing is, sometimes it happens that there are problems.