Re: Equivalent of *INZSR for service programs -- RPG400-L

I really hated RPG II when I first ran into it. All those bizarre indicators, the cycle, etc. After working in a shop that only used RPG, and I really had to learn all that stuff, my colleagues and I, who all preferred COBOL, noticed that we had started using RPG nomenclature to describe stuff we had to do in COBOL, e.g. L1 total time or L1 detail time, and I realized that RPG did a lot of "magic stuff" we had to write many lines of code to duplicate in COBOL.

HLLs do a lot of magic for us. Consider all the rules for EVAL, padding, truncating, etc. Or READE -- you could just do a READ and have an IF statement instead. I personally like the magic, it saves a lot of work on my part. Although it was fun to write an entire program on a single 80-column card back on the 1401 -- just counted the number of cards read, but still, pretty cool.

On 3/27/2019 2:22 PM, Roger Harman wrote:

Well, first off... I'm embarrassed to realize I didn't even catch the subject of Joe's original email. Duh, he said *INZSR <head slap>.

Secondly... I know you're a fan but... Heck no!

I will tell you that when I learned RPG over 30 years ago, my instructor went over the cycle, had us write a program or two using it, and then said "you need to know about it as it is part of the language" but he would never accept a cycle program in production in his shop - where six of us from the class later got hired.

Programs doing magic stuff without me telling it to give me the willies.

Roger Harman
COMMON Certified Application Developer - ILE RPG on IBM i on Power

From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of James H. H. Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2019 1:51 PM
To: RPG programming on IBM i
Subject: Re: Equivalent of *INZSR for service programs
On 3/27/19, 1:44 PM, Roger Harman wrote:
The idea of an auto-invoke makes me think of *INZSR which I detest.
"Magic" routines running on their own? No thanks.

Just a wild guess, but I would imagine you don't "ride The Cycle" very much.

;-p

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JHHL
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