Re: 7.1 and RPG prototypes

No the ideas are not "novel" - they were basically being discussed 25+ years ago.

In general IBM has not been in favour of partial solutions to issues such as this and it is not as if the prototyping requirements are that arduous.

If Barbara comes up with one of her usual brilliant solutions I will be the first to jump up and down with joy. But I'm not holding my breath because I just don't see the pay back being worth the expenditure. Would you rather have more Db2 enhancements or RPG language enhancements (procedure overloading or typeless parameters perhaps) or something that removes the new for prototypes?


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Mar 5, 2018, at 9:45 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 11:36 AM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What I don't understand is how you propose that the _using_ routine be informed of the interface requirements.

It would simply read the interface directly, wherever it lives. The
most likely place for that would be wherever the procedure is defined.
But I could also see having something separate. If separate, then it
could be something akin to a /COPY member, but not semantically
equivalent to copying, and not usable for arbitrary purposes. Maybe
call it /IMPORT, and only allow prototype information. (If you want to
talk practicality of implementation, this is only a small adjustment
to /COPY.)

It's easy to brainstorm alternatives, or more fleshed-out mechanisms.
For example, in the defining source, there could be an /EXPORT
directive to mark an exported interface, and the compiler could use
that to generate whatever it is that would be needed for successful
/IMPORT by the caller. Could be extra information stored in the
*MODULE object, or could be a completely new and separate *PROTOTYPE
object, whatever.

I can't imagine these ideas are incredibly novel. (I *think* they are
more-or-less along the lines of at least some of what Dieter was
talking about.)

John Y.
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