On 3/19/17, 5:36 AM, Henrik Rützou wrote:
I think that you have to work with different programming languages
intensivly to see RPG's little ackward syntax.
I have worked with probably more distinct programming languages than
most of the people on this List -- BASIC (IBM VS-BASIC, Radio Shack
Level I, various M$ BASICs), FORTRAN (IBM G1, WATFIV, CDC Cyber FORTRAN,
M$ FORTRAN for TRS-80), COBOL, Pascal, PL/I (CDC Cyber PL/I, CDC ANSI
PL/I, and IBM PL/I for AS/400) LISP, Assembler (PDP-11 and 8086),
Modula-2, C, QBASIC (Mac M$ BASIC, QuickBASIC and QBX; distinct from
BASIC because they do NOT use line numbers), MI, RPG (both OPM and ILE),
CL (both OPM and ILE), Smalltalk, and Java.
I CHERISH their diversity, both in strengths and in syntax.
The VERY LAST THING I want to see is for programming languages to
jettison the characteristics that make them distinct from each other. I
do NOT like it when a language *calls itself* FORTRAN, and yet abandons
the convention of "labels in columns 1-5, continuation in 6, statements
from 7 to 72." And I do NOT like it when IBM, instead of simply MAKING
PL/I AVAILABLE AGAIN, THIS TIME AS AN ILE LANGUAGE on the Midrange
platform, reworks RPG to make it look like a poor imitation of PL/I.
And likewise (as I've said many times before), I do NOT like it when The
Cycle, one of the most essential features of RPG, one of the things that
makes it a LANGUAGE OF CHOICE instead of a LANGUAGE OF NECESSITY because
nothing else is available, gets treated as hopelessly old-fashioned
and/or a hindrance to source code readability. You don't need to use (or
even understand) secondary files or level breaks in order to make good
use of The Cycle, and even without a Primary File, it can serve as a
built-in event loop for interactive programs.
--
JHHL
midrange.com
