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This is just idle curiosity ... I was chatting with a friend the other day and was trying to figure out if there was any modern RPG mechanisms that still required indicators (*INnn type).
'Required' is a bullet in the chamber of the gun called 'modern.' Caveat lector...
Last week I wrote a cycle data conversion program that used indicators on TESTN. No, it wasn't strictly required; I could have done something with a subprocedure and a boolean return value, but TESTN does exactly what I needed (a sanity check that I had the proper structure definition.) I could have rolled my own cycle, too. I could have written a bunch of SQL user defined functions in RPG and done the conversion in SQL if I wanted. Choices, choices.
In the end, I took the path that was easiest for me to write. If another programmer needs to maintain this one-timer (they never really are just one-timers, are they?) then I'm not at all sorry that he might have to read up on
* report fields that should be numbers but aren't * note that empty (blank) fields are OK TESTN charfld 2020 n20 EXCEPT badCharfldIn the end, my comfort with indicators in this context outweighed the distaste for global variables.
--buck
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