Re: Cycle programs and control level breaks -- RPG400-L

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'tgoing to have a primary file, I wouldn't write it as cycle-based. Thatmakes it harder to figure out what's going on for no particular benefitthat 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 itexplicitly. I have a couple of standard ways of handling level breaks so Idon't need the cycle for that.

The only things I can think of that are significantly easier with the cycleare 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 fieldscan only be used with program-described fields, that greatly limits theirusefulness, and makes matching records to be, in my opinion, the one reasonto 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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