Re: RPG passing parms to and from Rexx

On 24 August 2016 at 17:42, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 4:45 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I should have probably commented that. The reason I used all variables
instead of constants or literals is that I wanted the example to clearly
show that the logic could dynamically decide what 'function' to perform.

I appreciate your efforts to be illustrative, but I would think that
should already be abundantly clear by the fact that it's a
*parameter*, no?

Decades ago, there was a 'Teach yourself RPG' course; I can't remember
the company. They had an example of a compile time array that
traumatised me. They put the headings for a printed report in the
array. So the O-Specs were like

OQSYSPRT H 203 1P
O OR OF
O UDATE Y 10
O ARR,1 90
...

The reason this traumatised me isn't the example per se. It's the
fact that dozens; perhaps hundreds of RPG programmers took that
example as a way to do O-specs. I have personally witnessed this
pattern in thousands of programs, in multiple companies.

We've all of us seen how programmers tend to copy examples verbatim
and try to use them without first studying them to obtain
understanding. The threads on POI, Java, and Excel demonstrate the
problem.

I've now become too cautious with my examples because of this. Which
is why the subject line reads as it does. I'm not proposing a
wonderful way to make a BIF. I'm showing one way RPG and Rexx can
interact. And hoping that launches a few ideas.
--buck