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  2. RPG400-L
  3. December 2006

Re: Cycle programs and control level breaks

Hi James -


> For the specific conversion program that you described,
> personally I would not have given any serious
> consideration to trying to do it with the cycle
> and cycle-based level breaks.

But the two concepts are by no means inseparable. By using
The Cycle in an interactive program that doesn't use a
primary file, I get an implicit "do until finished" loop
that can effectively become the program's main event loop.
And if (as in the present case) there is a primary file, I
no longer have to care about explicitly reading the file
and looping on EOF, as that's all implicit.


Personally ...
1. I would not use the cycle in place of a loop. If the program isn't going to have a primary file, I wouldn't write it as cycle-based. That makes it harder to figure out what's going on for no particular benefit that I see.
2. I would not write a program with a primary (and possibly secondary) file(s) unless that gives me some significant benefit over coding it explicitly. I have a couple of standard ways of handling level breaks so I don't need the cycle for that.
The only things I can think of that are significantly easier with the cycle are things that involve looking ahead at the next record(s) in the file(s), which is matching records and look-ahead fields. Since look-ahead fields can only be used with program-described fields, that greatly limits their usefulness, and makes matching records to be, in my opinion, the one reason to use a cycle-based program. 

Ken
http://www.kensims.net/
Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views
of my employer or anyone in their right mind.

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