Re: Standards question: What is your feeling about %found & %eof vs. %found(file) & %eof(file) ?

James Lampert wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:

Anybody who has ever pontificated about "self-documenting" code
should be 100% behind the %eof(file) syntax.

Very true. And unless you REALLY WANT the "last accessed" file, and it doesn't matter what that file is, it never hurts to qualify.

On another note, given that RPG doesn't give you indenting to show nesting level, I always use ENDIF/ENDDO/ENDSL rather than END, and frequently add comments to indicate which group I'm supposed to be ending.

This, to my mind, is one of the primary reasons to move to free-form. Nesting control sequences makes code much more readable.

Then again, at times, I have enough nesting levels active that if I draw nesting lines on a printout (and I find I rarely go through a week without having to analyze nesting at least once), I might go through five ink colors twice.

I try to avoid that these days. Between compound IF statements and the use of subroutines and/or subprocedures, I try to avoid more than four layers of nesting. It's not always possible, but it's something I strive for. I mean, unless you have one line per state, you're talking about many dozens of lines of code when you nest ten deep. I prefer to try and limit my procedures to a single visible page (about 40-50 lines). I realize that's an arbitrary limit and it could technically allow much deeper indentation, but again, I do my best to avoid it.

Joe