Re: why rpg and not cobol

Hi, Jon:

My own experience with trying to use RPG with the "cycle" very much mirrors yours; I think I have never had occasion to write such a program, except as an "experiement" to try to learn what it was "all about".

(Dating myself) My own COBOL experience is from the mid '70s ... ;-) When I was in college, I actually had a summer job one year as an application programmer in a small IBM mainframe S/370-135 DOS/VS shop writing reports in COBOL -- ugh! Having already learned BASIC, FORTRAN, IBM/360 Assembler, some COBOL, PL/I and Pascal, I quickly became convinced that I did not aspire to be a COBOL applications programmer upon graduating.

All the best,

Mark S. Waterbury

> On 4/11/2013 12:41 PM, Jon Paris wrote:

> 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