Re: [IBMiOSS] RPG easier/harder to use than other languages?

Any other particular examples stick out for you? What can you do in

free-form RPG today that you wish you *couldn't* do in free-form RPG?

I am spoiled with Ruby syntax. I actually find the era of only c-specs
freeform (and d-specs fixed) to be much easier to read. D-specs are
cryptic, though succinct. Full free is, in my opinion, cryptic *and*
verbose. So we went backwards. Said another way, learning 100% freeform
RPG is worse than learning all the ways Node.js functions/objects can be
written; and that's pretty bad :-)

What do you mean by "stop trying"? Who is trying now?

Me. :-) That statement was me thinking out loud a bit.


Aaron Bartell
IBM i hosting, starting at $157/month. litmis.com/spaces


On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 3:47 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 3:39 PM, Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

For example, they *did* drop GOTO from free-form syntax. Are you saying

you wished they did more of that?

Yes.

Any other particular examples stick out for you? What can you do in
free-form RPG today that you wish you *couldn't* do in free-form RPG?

I think the important thing to focus on is ~why~ we'd want additional ILE
language ports. Maybe the weaknesses of PASE languages could be

addressed.

For example, if we like the integrated nature of RPG+DB2, well, maybe we
should stop trying to port languages to ILE and instead fix the DB2

issues

(which holds promise given the work Tony Cairns has been doing on a

variety

of OSS repos).

What do you mean by "stop trying"? Who is trying now? Other than
iSeriesPython (which frankly stopped "trying" years ago), I can't
think of any effort whatsoever to bring another language to QSYS.LIB.
To my knowledge, the only ILE languages in existence are the ones that
were rolled out right from the beginning (or very close to the
introduction of ILE, anyway).

The main weakness of PASE languages from my perspective is that PASE
itself doesn't seem to interact very well with QSYS.LIB. I had thought
this was an architectural problem (so only fixable at the operating
system level, or even deeper), but I would be happy to be mistaken.

John Y.
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