Re: Ending Free RPG

+1

Btw.. You left out 6502 Machine code.

Rich Marion

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James
H. H. Lampert
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2017 9:38 AM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: Ending Free RPG

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
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