RE: Cycle programs and control level breaks

Wow, gone from cycles and control breaks to implicit versus explicit! :)

And of course they were mostly 6000-line behemoths, 500+ lines of which were 
GOTOs!

Yep, sigh.. I once worked on a "multi-bodied program" ported originally from 
the S/34 to the S/36 to the AS/400, one program for each screen. It was nice to 
have the logic separated so.

You may save a few lines of code and a few minutes of your precious time

by coding a cycle pgm that, at least initially on the surface, looks
pleasingly elegant to the untrained eye.  

---> Or to some trained eyes too! Beauty (and frequently "elegance") is in the 
eye of the beholder is it not? It may even look not only pleasant but as a 
utilitarian benefit to some programmers, and James is now an example of someone 
new to it who appreciates the "benefit". 

I appreciate his appreciation, :) because I've taught RPG to COBOL programmers 
who couldn't get it that the compiler wrote so much code for them!

As to implicit, we have much more in the new and improved RPG than we ever had. 
Externally described files where the field definitions are implicitly assumed 
in the source, expression evaluations that require intermediate steps that used 
to be explicit in the RPG and now are implicit. Try it on a simple calculator 
ha ha, that's the way we used to have to do it in RPG haha!

Documentation is big to me, and clear maintenance-friendly code. Sometimes 
instead of the "Other" operation in a "Select" code-group, I'll write out the 
actual condition, for that reason. 

It's also important to remember, because "implicit" is coming at us fast in the 
segmentation made irresistably attractive with the coming on of ILE and service 
programs and subprocedures and the use of C-functions with names that are 
longer than a source record itself! 

That's also why when you do use service programs to have a prefix-naming 
convention or some way to easily track your subprocedure use to its service 
program. 

Alan 

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(Smiling for Christmas...)