Re: Scoping of procedure-level variables

Barbara Morris wrote:

When you say your recursion experiments suggest dynamic, you're talking about the storage type for the variables (see Joe Pluta's original post in this thread). You probably had variables in automatic storage, which meant you got new storage for each recursion. If you had coded STATIC, you would have seen different results (same variable for all recursions).

Actually, given that ILE RPG supports neither inline true inner blocks (i.e., blocks with local variables in inline code), nor nested procedure definitions, most of the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping falls away (at least unless you've got something that looks like the test case in the Wikipedia article).

But you are correct (and it goes to show just how much programming language design theory I've forgotten), in that I was asking the wrong question. The issue with the program in question was really a matter of local scope overriding global. (To restate what had happened, the programmer in question had intended DS definitions in an INCLUDE to overlay file fields, but because he'd put the include in at procedure level instead of module level, they were *overriding* rather than *overlaying* the file fields.)