Re: why rpg and not cobol

On Thu, 11 Apr 2013, at 09:29:28, Mark S Waterbury <mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But, for some reason, on the System/38 and early AS/400, many RPG III or RPG/400 programmers religiously avoided the cycle, … , or
perhaps just because they wanted to be "in control" of exactly what their program was doing.

I can't speak for others but I seem to recall that I pretty much gave up on the cycle when I found I was spending more time trying to shoe horn my program into the cycle box than writing the code. i.e. I was spending more time fighting the cycle than utilizing it. After a while it just became easier to code everything that way although I still wrote some reports that way when control levels etc. were an essential part of the process and therefore fit well.

As to your comment on the verbosity of COBOL - I was involved some years ago in assisting a "name" RPG programmer who was having to do COBOL for the first time in many years. He was preparing COBOL versions of a library of RPG interactive programs that he had been supplying to clients for many years. At the end of the project he commented that most of his new COBOL programs were actually significantly shorter than the corresponding RPG versions. Oftent he view of COBOL as verbose is based on people's knowledge of 1970s version of COBOL and not ANSI '85 and beyond. They also did not have the COPY-DDS type functionality of COBOL/400.

I still prefer RPG - particularly subprocedures, prototyping, etc. but COBOL often gets a bad rap.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com