Re: Where to post ideas for RPG

-----John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: -----

P.S. Every language except embedded SQL would have the same problem that RPG has. Namely the call is strongly typed, down to the precision and scale of the
parameters and return value. So I can't cover every possible option in a single sub-procedure regardless of the language.

Well, not *every* language. You definitely would not have that problem
in Python, which is in fact strongly typed. (It's just also
dynamically typed.) You probably would not have that problem in Ruby
either. I'm not sure about JavaScript, Rexx, or PHP, but they strike
me as having a good chance of not having that problem either. All of
these languages are available on the i. It's true none of them are
full participants in ILE, though, so you would have to adjust your
concept of "sub-procedure". (And of course, some if not all of them
already have min and max built in.)

Given that the context was creating a procedure to be called from RPG to simulate %min and %max functions, yes every language that can be called from RPG as a function, and return a value, can Python even do that, would have the same issues. The reason is, and the limitation of RPG sub-procedure parameters, is that parameters are always strongly typed. I can't just say, this is a number, and any number will work. In fact, unless I use floats, I have to specify the number of decimal positions, and that precludes numbers with more decimal positions, or If I provide the maximum possible decimal positions, that severely limits the size of the integer portion of the number. And floats have their own issues since they are not exact numbers.

Mark Murphy