Re: Is RPG 'DEAD"

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

Yes, because java doesn't support operator overloads. If it did you
could do:

MyClass saveObject = originalObject;

And the addition of decimals would also be trivial as the + operator
would be overloaded to work as expected.

You could define a method on the class called something like CopyFrom()
or create a copy constructor that created one object from another.

Sure, you *can* create a copy constructor. Just like I *can* emulate most OO features in RPG (with the possible exception of polymorphism, but even that can be emulated with procedure pointers if you're sick and twisted enough).

I think Lim's point is that RPG is better suited for some classes of business work because of the features that are already inherent in the language.

Besides, operator overloading, especially in the case above, is a very questionable technique. Since the statement "saveObject = originalObject" normally does *not* copy the object, but only the reference, then consider the code below:

MyClass saveObject = originalObject;
saveObject.setValue(1);

Without operator overloading, this sets the value of both saveObject and originalObject. If you then overload the operator, suddenly you have a new object, and then code that originally counted on the normal operation of the = operator breaks horribly.

I've never been a fan of changing the existing behavior of an operator. It falls in the category of clever coding, and can lead to absolutely undebuggable code. I remember the macro assembler days when guys spent weeks getting a macro to work correctly, only to move on to some other project and leave us poor maintenance programmers with the task of figuring out what the thing actually did...

Joe