Re: Matching record. Was: Indicating Total Time in Free Form when using RPG Cycle

Great explanation and justification for your coding preference. When
the hospital system was still active, we sometimes made modifications
to vendor code. Left their code alone, but coded to newer standards.
Some of that stuff looked like RPG II.

But, reading your very reasonable response gave me a flashback to Star
Trek: The Motion Picture. Don't want to spoil it for anybody who has
not seen it.

John McKee

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 1/25/2013 12:32 PM, Jerry C. Adams wrote:

Matching records are still defined in the RPG Reference Manual for V5.
Maybe just covering their bums. .-)

Matching record works just fine in IBM i 7.1 TR5 (the latest and
greatest). I have a very... experienced program that I've been
maintaining for a few years now. It was written using matching record
back in the 80s. Maybe earlier. For all I know, this old thing came
from a System/3 card system.

As I've been working on it, I converted it to RPGLE and have been adding
sub-procedures to it. The main, fixed form blocks of code I leave
intact, but the new functions get written in /free.

So I have an RPGLE program with program described primary and secondary
files, matching record, massive numbers of left hand indicators,
sub-procedures written in /free for local use, sub-procedures bound by
service program and very soon I'll be adding a spreadsheet as an
error/exception report (in addition to the venerable printed exception
report - with O-specs).

I myself as a personal preference don't really have a desire to convert
all that code to /free. It's old, left-handery confusiness - adding
more white space to it isn't going to make the code suddenly become
clear. So I leave it as-is. New code, newly thought up, newly
implemented - that's /free. If it makes sense, I'll mix /free and FIXED
one after the other; I don't understand why I would spend days looking
for a one line /free alternate to MOVE when that particular MOVE has
been tested, debugged and working for a decade.

The good news is that using modern ideas and modern techniques, every
time I touch that beast it becomes more stable, less fragile and easier
to understand - by others, not just me. That's a good deal today and
it'll be a good deal in the future when the application finally goes
transactional instead of batch, and will need to be re-written entirely.
--buck
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