Ever since I read the e-mail (in the archives at this link
http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l/201009/msg00240.html )
from Charles Wilt, I have been converting any RPG 400 that I have to touch to RPG IV. As a local government, we haven't, and likely won't, buy anything except CVTRPGSRC.
And that has been working fine, I run it through CVTRPGSRC, make my changes in a more familiar context (RPGIV), mark the old source as RPGOBS (obsolete) and put the new one into production. As Charles mentioned, I add a DFTACTGRP(*YES) and a few more H specs I like (*nodebugio) and our general binding directory and I can use our service programs, bifs, /free if I want to without having to remember why the verifier is barking at me about unsupported something. Also the conversion has just made it more likely that I understand the program quicker the next time instead of figuring out how we used to do something in RPG III.
HTH,
TIA,
Thanks,
(Whichever applies)
Dave B
Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral. -- Robert Orben (comedy writer)
-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 12:10 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Subject: Re: Impossible to even think about rewriting in RPG
Blake, thank you for your description of what RDP does. It totally
sounds like it would be helpful, but getting my employer to spend hard
dollars is always a struggle.
Bryce, I will have to do more research. Large portions of our
codebase are still RPG III, and if I understand correctly, there isn't
a way to incorporate any ILE benefits to those until they are at least
converted to RPG IV. We do write almost all of our new RPG in RPG IV
(making use of the better syntax and BIFs and so forth but minimal if
any use of ILE), but right now I think there are still too many
critical RPG III pieces that we find it very daunting to make the
wholesale switch. (I fear some of those old pieces make use of
dubious older features and methodologies that I don't think we can
just use the automated converter to convert them all without breaking
something.)
I fully understand that most of the problem is irrational on our part,
but we do our best to knock the pieces we do touch into better shape
than they were before.
Dennis, I realize most assemblers for a very long time have not
required things to be in *specific* columns. However, my point is
that long-time users of legacy RPG get used to seeing things formatted
in that *style*. If you take a piece of columnar RPG code out of SEU
and paste it into a plain editor, then adjust all the opcodes to be
further to the right by a space or two, that does not change the human
readability practically at all, especially in RPG IV. SEU may care,
and the compiler may care, but the human typically doesn't.
Also, I think some older programmers (subconsciously) are aided by the
fact that only so much can happen on one line of traditional RPG.
When you can have arbitrary expressions (and this applies to EVAL, IF,
DOW, etc. just as much as /free), you can start to pack a lot more
into a line (and sometimes more and sometimes less), and for some
brains, it makes each line harder to parse.
When it comes to /free, I also have the peculiarity that I'm now used
to not having semicolons at the end of my lines. I find it especially
jarring that even an if statement needs a semicolon after it, because
this isn't how C works. (This is more of a writing hiccup than a
reading one.)
John
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