There are many enhancements to the RPG Language in this release (some
of these were made available in earlier TRs through PTFs):
* A varying-dimension array is defined with
DIM(*AUTO:maximum_elements) or DIM(*VAR:maximum_elements). The second
parameter of the DIM keyword indicates the maximum number of elements
in the array.
. The dimension of a varying-dimension array can be changed by
assigning a value to the %ELEM built-in function.
. The dimension of a varying-dimension array defined with DIM(*AUTO)
increases when there is an assignment statement to an element that is
greater than the current number of elements.
. You can specify *NEXT as the index for an array defined with
DIM(*AUTO) when the array is modified by an assignment statement. The
dimension of the array increases by one.
* Specify DIM(*CTDATA) to specify that the dimension of a compile-time
array or table is determined by the number of records in the
compile-time data.
* The SAMEPOS keyword positions a subfield at the same starting
position as another subfield.
* New PSDS subfields:
. Internal job ID, in positions 380 to 395
. System name, in positions 396 - 403
* The ON-EXIT section runs every time that a procedure ends, whether
the procedure ends normally or abnormally.
* When a qualified data structure is defined using free-form RPG
syntax, a subfield can be directly defined as a nested data structure
subfield using DCL-DS and END-DS to define the subfield.
* The new DATA-INTO operation code reads data from a structured
document, such as JSON, into an RPG variable. It requires a parser to
parse the document. The DATA-INTO operation calls the parser, and the
parser passes the information in the document back to the DATA-INTO
operation, which places the information into the RPG variable.
* Built-in function %PROC() returns the external name of the current procedure.
* Complex qualified names can be used in more places:
. Built-in function %ELEM
. Built-in function %SIZE
. Operation code DEALLOC
. Operation code RESET
* New built-in functions %MAX and %MIN can be used in definition
statements and calculation statements.
* ALIGN(*FULL) defines the length of a data structure as a multiple of
its alignment. This is important for avoiding storage-corruption
problems when calling functions written in ILE C.
* The CRTBNDRPG and CRTRPGMOD commands now support compiling from
Unicode source by specifying either an EBCDIC CCSID or *JOB for the
new TGTCCSID parameter.
Full details on IBM i 7.4 can be found here:
https://ibm.co/2KWgCcC
midrange.com
