Re: Formal RPG Free Standards

I can definitely appreciate the indenting of code. I have seen some
truly nasty code from our current vendor with more than ten levels of
nesting. Fixed format RPG IV and RPG III. Truly nasty stuff.

Less than 70 days on our i remain. I got the idea, somewhere, that
there were things that could not be done in fee that can be done
easily in fixed. Data type conversions come to mind with the MOVE.
Of course, BIFs get around that. What rare programming I do in these
last days, I use fixed RPG IV. So nice to have compound expressions,
such as building a formatted date (09/08/2012) for a picky vendor from
separate fields. And then being able to read it later.

John McKee


On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 12:11 AM, Scott Klement
<rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi John,

I understand how you made the mistake.

FWIW -- there are _very_ few things that can be done in free format that
you can't also do in fixed format. (in almost the exact same way!)

The big advantages to free format are:

1) The ability to indent code (since opcodes, factor1/factor2/result,
etc) don't have to be in particular positions.

2) More space, since you don't waste about 1/2 of each line of code with
unnecessarily blanks. This is the BIGGIE for me... having space to
write things. It was so hard to make expressions fit in the "extended
factor 2" syntax, since you were so limited in space.

The advantage is NOT functionality. Aside from the %FIELDS BIF, I can't
think of anything that you can code in free-format that doesn't also
work in fixed.




On 9/7/2012 11:30 PM, John McKee wrote:

Been almost twenty years since I coded anything in C. My intent,
poorly executed, was to show how free format might look. Never coded
in free format. Only have seen examples.

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