Re: Formal RPG Free Standards

I agree that most things you can do in free you can do in fixed, although I don't think the list of key fields in a CHAIN - as in "chain (key1: literal2: key3) myfile" - is supported in fixed format. I haven't really tried it except in passing, but even if it were supported you'd immediately run up against the maximum length of 14 for factor 1. That brings me to the other reason I love free which is a corollary of the more space issue you raised: in /free you can use long names. Whether it's just longer, more meaningful field and procedure names or it's taking advantage of qualified data structures, having the extra space in the lines definitely makes programming in /free easier.

Joe

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.