Re: MAIN or cycleless programs.

... it doesn't make too much sense to me to have a possibility to name a program entry point "exit". If its named main then its meant as program entry point, in rpg you are ending up with H main(main) to clearify that main should be real program entry point. looks to me like the need to code /free and /end-free - what else should a line be with a blank at position 6??? The diffrence you mentioned is, that C has overloading and needs a fixed signature for main, but in RPG we are ending up at the same point, in reality the signature is the same: a main has zero to n parameters, passed by untyped pointers.

Dieter

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Barbara Morris" <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 11:43 PM
Newsgroups: midrange.rpg400-l
To: <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: MAIN or cycleless programs.

On 2010/11/5 3:47 PM, dieter.bender@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

... (funny: why didn't they hav a a look to C, where
main is named "main" - shudder). ...

Because in C, there's no relationship between the prototype for the
program and the main procedure.

#pragma linkage(MYPGM, OS)
void MYPGM(int *i, int *j, char *p);
main(int argc, void *argv[])
{
// The C compiler doesn't know or care that this
// main() function matches the MYPGM prototype
}

This gives a lot of flexibility, since I can interpret the argv
parameter any way I like. But I'd rather that the C compiler be able to
catch the error if I code this

main(int argc, void *argv[])
{
char *p = (char *) argv[1];
int i = *(int *) argv[2];
int j = *(int *) argv[3];
}

For RPG, if every main procedure were to be called "main", you'd need
two prototypes for each main procedure, one called "main" in the module
containing the main procedure, and one called "prtreport" or whatever in
the modules that would call the main procedure.
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