Re: Ending Free RPG

<Jon>
at least two people on this list who spend a lot of time training non-RPGers in the language have found that students find the dcl style syntax way easier than the old D-spec. Period. End of story.
</Jon>
I'm one of those, using more than one language extensively, mostly RPG or Java.
Writing new stuff in RPG:
- I don't use RLA => there's no need for F, I, O, declarations and "calculaions" are sufficient
- I do use change management => (nearly) no need for H specs
- all "calculation" in free (why did it take so long to drop the noise instructions /free and /end-free???)
- annoying are the funny ';' inside instructions (after 'if', 'else'...)
BTW: I don't use CL any more, all you could do in CL, could be done with RPG!

about declarations and so called totally free
- it's a strong feature of RPG to have all declarations at the beginning of it's block
- I'm missing block local declarations (inside a loop, for instance)
- C type languages (Java etc. included) (nearly) all blocks have curly brackets, easy to beautify, easy to read.
- Procedure blocks, coded with P specs are easier to recognize than DCL-P blocks (this got worse with totally free!!!)

- free form declarations introduced a new noise instruction, let me call it 'DCL-x' and you would have to repeat it over and over again
even cobol did it better, having a section for declarations. most languages, coding type and name are sufficient to make a declaration.
Another funny feature of free form declarations are int and float numbers with length, other languages use int, long, bigint, float, double etc.

from my old school RPG perspective P and D specs are more convinient, than the new free alternatives.
from my Java perspective the free alternatives for P specs and PR and PI other declarations are far away from ease of use for non RPG programmers, learning RPG.

Dieter Bender