Re: Multi- Occurrence Data Structure

Larry Ducie wrote:

I will appraise them of such things as the cycle . . .

That is good: an RPG program can USE The Cycle (conventionally or unconventionally, and I find the latter at least as useful as the former); it can SHORT-CIRCUIT The Cycle; it can, in the most recent versions of RPG, even DISABLE The Cycle; it is, however, IMPOSSIBLE to write an RPG program that simply IGNORES The Cycle.

. . . but I will certainly not expect them to use it in our shop.

Why not? If they're writing a program that performs a given operation on every single record of a file (or, at the very least, looks at every single record, and performs the operation where it's needed), you have the perfect situation for a "conventional" Cycle program. If they're writing an interactive "do-until-the-user-tells-it-to-stop" program, that's the perfect situation for an "unconventional" Cycle program. Either way, adding an explicit do-loop and (in the first case) explicit file reads just adds unnecessary complexity.