Re: Where to post ideas for RPG

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 11:22 PM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The arguments do not have to all be the same sign - one of the tests
compared negative and positive - works due to a fortuitous characteristic of
EBCDIC - alpha characters precede numerals - this would not work in ASCII.
Same data type, including length and precision, OK.

No, Vern, the one test you tried was 4 versus -2. This is not enough
to really exercise the comparison, and whether it works has nothing to
do with EBCDIC versus ASCII collating sequence. Your particular test
works because the positive number has larger absolute value, and you
used a BCD type. Try again with negative numbers much further away
from zero.

(Also, it's not "fortuitous" that EBCDIC worked out the way that it
did; it was entirely by design. No luck involved whatsoever.)

How about some positive ideas about whether it is possible? I don't know -
would operational descriptors do anything worthwhile?

I doubt your scheme can be salvaged. I don't know what an operational
descriptor is.

A lot of min/max stuff in C++ seem to be implemented as macros - no such
animal, is there, in RPG? Side effects are mentioned.

I don't know what C++ you are looking at. It is common in C to use
macros for these kinds of things, though that is actually discouraged.
There are definitely no macros in RPG.

This was not presented as a final solution - maybe someone else will see
value here and run with it - a very generic, type-safe pair of functions -
or someone writes an RFE or COMMON requirement to ask Barbara to take care
of solving it!

Mark already posted this RFE last week, which he linked to in this very thread:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=93114

John Y.