Re: FW: Niftiest thing(s) you have done in RPG ILE or /FREE

James Lampert wrote:

Michael Ryan wrote:

Why? What can I do in the cycle that I can't do without the cycle? How
does the cycle make the code more efficient? How does the cycle make
the code clearer to most folks? What's the advantage of using the
cycle?

Among other things, if you don't use The Cycle, you have to disable it, one way or another. So if you've got some process that has to be applied to every record of a file, why walk through the file when you can ride? And if you have an interactive program that runs in a "do-until-done" event loop, why bother explicitly disabling the one that's there implictly, only to explicitly create one of your own?

What can you do in RPG that you can't do in PL/I? Or C? Or COBOL?

An alternatively phrased question might simply be why use RPG at all if some basic defining characteristics are disregarded?

One of my very first "successes" was winning a 'contest' offered by an operations manager. A die-hard RPG (II) programmer said he could do a task involving printing a half-dozen or so sets of mailing labels, each set to include a different number of labels. I asked "Why not do it in COBOL? It'd be easier." He strongly disagreed, and the ops manager offered a beer to the first one who returned with the correct results.

The COBOL was far easier to get done. PL/I probably would have been almost as easy.

Tom Liotta