RE: *ENTRY PLIST to free-form procedure interface

[Roger Harman <roger.harman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll admit to (usually) commenting this as *ENTRY Plist also to help the less forward-thinking folks.

Also, I am firmly in the "lazy" camp that Joe alluded to.  *n is great!



-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dan
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 2:26 PM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: *ENTRY PLIST to free-form procedure interface

Thanks Joe,

Your assumption is what I presumed, but wasn't sure if there were other
instances where a procedure could have more than one procedure interface.

I'm trying to determine a good standard for our "*entry plist" procedure
interfaces, since we're fairly new at using them here.  Personally, I think
I'd like to name these procedure interfaces Entry_Plist.  For example:

dcl-pi Entry_Plist;
 Parm1   char(   1);
 Parm2   char(   1);
 Parm3   char(   1);
end-pi;

I guess if I can get it through my thick skull that procedures can never
have more than one procedure interface, I can live without that.  But, I
think it might be useful to other devs here who don't know how the *ENTRY
PLIST C-specs convert to procedure interface.  If I didn't name them
Entry_Plist, I would most certainly need to add a comment at the end of the
DCL-PI statement, i.e.:  // <-- *ENTRY PLIST

- Dan

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 5:11 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> I'm assuming you know that the dcl-pi inside a procedure is for that
> procedure, and as far as I know you can only have one of those.
> Additionally, the name is optional. In fact, I declare it with the name *n,
> like so:
>
> dcl-pi *n ind end-pi;
>
> The declaration above is sufficient for any procedure with no parameters
> that returns an indicator.  I tend to have a few of those in my programs
> (isInteractive, for example).
>
> So that being the case, just think of your mainline as the "wrapper" for
> your entire program.  Again, you can only have one of those, but there the
> benefit that you don't have to name it. So in your case, this would work:
>
> dcl-pi *n;
>  Parm1   char(   1);
>  Parm2   char(   1);
>  Parm3   char(   1);
> end-pi;
>
> The big benefit to this being that this interface definition works for any
> program with the same parameters.
>
> Just me being lazy, I guess.  :)
>
> Joe