Re: Free format H, F, D and P specs

Steve,

I completely agree with you. But collections is not what IBM gave us. I
wonder if IBM even thinks about collections. All they gave us is
'syntactical sugar' (what a nice term). Why did they not give us real
sugar but 'diet sugar'.

Thomas.


rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx schrieb am 08.10.2013 14:08:08:

Von: stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx
An: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx,
Datum: 08.10.2013 14:08
Betreff: Re: Free format H, F, D and P specs
Gesendet von: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 2:39 AM, <thomas.raddatz@xxxxxx> wrote:

For example from the day when IBM introduced procedures with V3, I
wonder why we have to use P specs to start/end a procedure and D specs

for

the procedure interface. Using only P specs whould have been a lot

easier

and clearer (at least for me):

Braces and combining the P and D specs would be nice. But it is just
syntactical sugar ( a term Anders Hejlsberg uses ). Consider that a code
editor could easily put those elements in the language. Or a pre

compiler.

I can argue that IBM should focus on improving the pre compiler, making

it

easier to integrate with the debugger. Once that is done then anyone

could

produce their own version of RPG that had braces and a simpler procedure
declaration.

What is really needed in the language is references, reference counting

and

garbage collection. Once you have that then you can have the various

types

of collections that you see in .NET ( when variables are addressed by
reference they can be placed in collections without having to copy their
contents. ) Once you have full featured collections like dynamic

arrays,

linked lists, etc you can move on to morphing a collection into a

database

and vice versa. Where you order by a collection the same way you order

by a

table, or join a table to a collection.

-Steve
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