Re: RPG V?

Hi all,

As Kurt says, the main point is not about a "missed window of
opportunity". I think that point here is that any improvement is
always welcome.

Bob's use of DCL opcodes remembers me of ASNA's Visual RPG. Its free
format RPG (Caviar) is based, loosely, on a CL-like type of syntax.
For example;

DCLDISKFILE NAME(FileName) TYPE(*INPUT) ORG(*INDEXED)
DCLFLD VarName *Char Len(30)

and so on. I concur that it can be a bit redundant.

What I would really appreciate is to be able to use more than one
instruction on a single line, but I'm not really hopeful on this
one...


Regards,

Luis Rodriguez
IBM Certified Systems Expert — eServer i5 iSeries



On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Kurt Anderson
<kurt.anderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for the article link, Hans.

I'm all in for a fully free format RPG.  I really don't get what you're talking about with a window of opportunity.  I wish WDSC would color code %BIFs.  I've been wishing it for, oh, 5 years or more.  If they suddenly did it, I wouldn't say, "Sorry, you missed your opportunity."  Now, if you simply don't care about what they're doing, then that's a whole nother story.

From the article:

"...no RPG IV programmer today would admit that they enjoy typing in the COLON separator."
Honestly, I never minded.  I hit the shift key all the time for uppercasing without a thought.  Sure, I don't type a colon and think, "Man, my day was pretty crappy, but now that I typed a colon, I think it's looking brighter."  I'm splitting hairs.  I do agree a comma is probably better, I just think his comment was a bit over the top.

A comment about his speculation... I think that the conversion should be done without the DCL opcode.  I think it's excessive and it doesn't allow for visual differentiation.  All I see are a bunch of DCL statements.  For comparison:

Bob's Speculation:
dcl File(myFile)
dcl var(myVar) Len(5)
dcl const(myConstant) Value('test')

My Preference:
File myFile
var myVar Len(5)
Const myConstant Value('test')

Eliminates the need for the DCL and also no longer needs parens around the name of the value (that's 5 keystrokes not including two shift hits)

I do like his idea of the indenting DS.  However, instead of a DCL DS(mYDS) I think a simple DS; or DS myDS; would be sufficient to start the DS (since you don't need to name the DS).  I do like the EndDS; idea.

So while my email has been a bit picky, I actually really enjoyed his article and speculation.  I am excited to see a true free-format RPG language.

-Kurt

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hans Boldt
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 8:31 AM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RPG V?

Bob Cozzi wrote an article on what a fully free-form RPG V language
might look like, based on rumors that IBM is working on such a thing. I
have my opinions on the subject, and I'd be curious to know what others
here might think.

(See http://systeminetwork.com/article/what-rpg-v-might-look)

What do I think? As the principle developer behind free-form calcs, you
might think I'd be happy to see a fully free-form language. But I'm
finding it hard to get excited about the concept. I think IBM missed
it's window of opportunity years ago. There was a lot of excitement
surrounding the release of free-form calcs. IBM should have capitalized
on that buzz immediately, and followed up with additional free-form
specs in the immediately subsequent releases.

But, at that time, the concensus was that there weren't really any
significant advantages to making other specs fully free-form, and that
other enhancements took priority. That's probably still true today. I
think RPG still needs some work in certain areas, such as namespace
support, an IBM-supplied procedure library, and externally described
procedures.

What do you think? Is there a need for RPG V? If IBM is indeed serious
about an RPG V, what might the rationale be?

Cheers! Hans
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