RE: Question about legacy coding style

I was attending a community college in '88 that had a 36.

In the RPGII class we did a program using 100.0001

I think I always used a data structure once I job a job programming.

Now it's var_num = %dec(%date(var_num: oldformat): newformat) which I'm sure
burns a lot of cpu cycles, but it's easy to read.

The more machine you have, the more cpu we burn to make our jobs easier.


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Wilt [mailto:charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 9:09 AM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: Re: Question about legacy coding style

I remember being new to RPG and sitting down with a pencil and paper
to figure out what MULT 100.0001 was doing....

I remember thing it was a neat trick...then a couple years later ran
across a rant about it included a description of the hoops it required
the CPU to jump through....

I started replacing them as I found them...

Charles

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On 3/24/2011 4:51 AM, Craig Pelkie wrote:

Thanks for all of the replies.

This type of thing always strikes me as being "programming archeology",

in

that you had to be there to really know why something was done (what it

is

doing is not too hard to discern, but the "why's" become dimmer over

time).

There should probably be some project launched as a wiki to collect and
document these kinds of idioms. Somebody 10 years from now won't have any
idea why this was done, and those who remember, well, they might not be

on

this list. Legacy COBOL is probably the same way (to pick another widely
used language with an enormous legacy code base).

Absolutely.  MULT 100.0001 has to go in there!  I can't imagine anybody
but an (old) RPG programmer being able to decipher that one.

I have a couple of old 8085 assembler tricks rattling around in my head
as well <grin>.

Joe
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