Re: Not valid? Dow (p = %scan( '~' : SPdetl : PosLastDelim + 1)) > 0;

That’s cheating John <grin> - I absolutely agree that it is “fighting” the language.

To me one of the most valuable points of using subprocs is that I should be able to rely on the fact that only the receiver changes and not any of the parms. If you can’t be sure of that then a subproc has the same problems as a subroutine i.e. you have to go look at the code before you can be sure what it does.

By the way - I was not commenting on Chris’ option (should have made that clear) but I never received the original post so I commented on what I saw.


On Sep 11, 2015, at 11:31 AM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The simple version of the code would be:

Dow %scan( '~' : SPdetl : PosLastDelim + 1) > 0;

But of course that would not give you access to the current value. If you need p then it has to be two separate operations - RPG cannot combine an assignment with a condition as you can do in some other languages.

You absolutely can in RPG: you just have to define a procedure that
both returns a value AND modifies its parameters. That was the whole
point of Chris's suggestion.

Personally, I think this is not a good use of procedures (the
avoidance of one line of idiomatic RPG code). Even if you use this
kind of loop all over the place (so that you achieve a net savings in
lines of code), to me this amounts to fighting the language.

John Y.
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