RE: Chalk one up for "The Cycle"

Do we just ignore "<tic>" items in email now?
That's a shame.

-Bob Cozzi
www.i5PodCast.com
Ask your manager to watch i5 TV



-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Cassidy, Alan
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 7:32 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: Chalk one up for "The Cycle"

If you're knowledgeable about RPG, C, OPNQRYF, CL, MI, PL/I, BASIC, FORTRAN,
HTML, and C, why haven't you learned SQL yet?

I suppose he could have countered with:

"Why haven't you learned to delegate yet? After all, I can update a file without
writing a single line of code." <tic>

___What Bob said.

And that said, give the guy a friggin' break! He said his point was aimed at the
ones who say the cycle is obsolete. I agree with him that it has its place in
coding with faster efficiency, and he already said if he had known SQL he
probably would have done it with SQL.

Geez, he did the thing in two lines, and here two weeks later I can see my old
RPG students, veteran Cobol programmers, wandering around in confusion, asking,
"Yeah, but where do you read the file? Yeah, but how do you input the file
records?" And the C++ guys (in which I'm a newbie but future master) are
wondering how you can do that without any includes or prototypes or functions or
brackets!

Now I also encourage him to learn SQL, he'll get there. I am myself moving to do
all my new file stuff in SQL now, just because IMO IBM is going to expand on SQL
for database use, not on DDS, they've said so, therefore it's the curve of time
coming this way. But even there, I find myself often "emulating" the cycle when
it's a report with totals and all that...

---Alan