Re: Adoption of RPG OA (Summary)

On 3/20/2011 5:49 PM, Vern Hamberg wrote:

I guess I would not consider the use of OAR to be usurping an opcode. It
does "redirect" what RPG does (or extends what RPG CAN do) when an
opcode is specified. You also say you don't know what it is doing. I
suggest we don't really know now what native IO is doing, either - RPG
calls data management routines for each opcode. Now, if a handler is
specifed, THAT is called instead of DM routines. We trust DM, we can
learn to trust a different black box. We've learned to trust the
blackbox that is SQL without really knowing all that it is doing.

A lot of your points are fine, but I just don't agree with this one. I know EXACTLY what a CHAIN is doing - it's getting a set of fields from the database. I know what it's doing, and I also know (roughly) how long it's going to take. Perhaps most importantly I know that there are zero side effects.

Once you start adding triggers and handlers and all that, it does indeed turn into a black box. And what worked one day may suddenly stop working because somebody touched the handler program. Whereas yesterday I was just reading a file and perhaps doing a little formatting, now I may be calling an external program - and adding all the overhead that ensues.

Take it for what it's worth. Call me a Luddite, but I just see OA as potentially complicating one of the things in programming that is the least complicated: a CHAIN to a database file. Personally, I don't need a way to make a CHAIN act like a CALL when I have a perfectly good CALL to do it for me.

Joe