Re: RPG V?

On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 5:43 AM, Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree that RPG should have procedure overloading (he calls it
parameter overloading)--I'd spend my entire 100 dollars on that one
feature ...

... I want the RPG developers to give me the stuff I CAN'T write. I don't
want them to do stuff the average RPG developer is simply too lazy to
implement and I don't want them to waste money tarting up the syntax.

I assume by "RPG developer", Simon is referring to the IBM designers
and programmers of the RPG compiler.If the ILE pre compiler worked
properly and was fully documented, we would not need IBM to add
anything to RPG to get the language features that any of us want.

A procedure overloading pre compiler would:
a. ) Read as input, RPG source code which contains multiple
definitions of a procedure that differ by their parameters,
b. ) Decorate those procedure names so they are no longer identical.
c. ) Scan for all references to the overloaded procedure names and
replace with the correct decorated name ( according to the arguments )
d. ) Pass along this new view of the source code, where procedure
names are no longer ambiguous as far as the IBM ILE RPG compiler is
concerned, as the output of the "procedure overloading pre compiler".
e. ) Create a debugger view to enable the output of the "procedure
overloading pre compiler" to be one of the source code views available
in the interactive debugger.
f. ) Somehow, somewhere, store the relationship between the ambiguous
procedure names and the decorated names.
g. ) Write a new version of the DSPPGM, DSPSRVPGM and DSPMOD commands
which shows the overloaded procedure names the way you coded them. (
the QSYS versions of these commands will show the decorated names. )