Re: Impossible to even think about rewriting in RPG

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Bryce Martin <BMartin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yes, an IDE.  For me, WDSC 7.  For a lot of others, RDP, RDI, etc.  They
are magic bullets.  They don't do everything for you, but they do allow
you to easily see and navigate your program structures.  I'm really
SHOCKED that you are programming in python but you haven't used a modern
IDE.... this really does boggle my mind.  So you must do all of your
python coding via a command line editor or notepad?

Well, I use a programmer's editor on my PC for most of my Python
coding (mainly, I just make use of the syntax highlighting,
autoindent, and execute-module features; it has other features that I
rarely or never use). I happen to use SciTE, but there are a number
of editors that would be fine. For larger Python programs, I
occasionally fire up a lightweight IDE (Geany or PyScripter), but I
rarely need this. Then I use FileZilla to handle transfer of the
source to the AS/400.

The thing about Python is that it is so high-level and so dynamic that
the programs very rarely get big. There isn't a lot of boilerplate to
write, so there's not much pain in just typing everything yourself.
My biggest Python "app" on the AS/400 is a utility to create Excel
binary files from DDS-defined physical files (including proper
handling of dates, column headings, the ability to inject Excel
formatting specs, automatic column sizing, excluding PF columns from
the Excel file, etc.) and it's under 350 lines, including generous
comment header and reasonable use of blank lines for separation.
(Granted, it makes use of a third-party Python package to generate the
Excel, plus a table of character widths loaded from a separate module
that I'm not counting.)

People who write big packages in Python really ought to use an IDE,
but to this point I have not really needed more more than a few
hundred lines for anything, especially for stuff on the AS/400.

John