Re: Upcoming spring 2021 RPG enhancements announced today

It is a little naive perhaps.

FOR-EACH, %LIST, etc. are easily accomplished by code gen. The underlying code is in place for all of them - they are just syntactic constructs on top of simple conventional operations.

The Spring 2020 needed run time PTFs for the %DEC, %INT, etc. support. Same for the %Timestamp changes. In fact if you look at this page https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/1106229 you'll see that 50% or so in recent years have required run time PTFs. To be expected when enhancements come out all the time - not just when OS releases occur.

Many features like %DEC use run time procedures - you wouldn't do code gen for that. Same applies to %SPLIT (for example) that is going to be a call to a procedure, no way you would do code gen and duplicate it in each and every program that used it.


Jon Paris

On Apr 16, 2021, at 10:29 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

7.3
ILE RPG runtime: SI76098 - you need this PTF on any 7.3 system where you
run a program with %LOWER, %UPPER, or %SPLIT
ILE RPG compiler: SI76100

Interesting. So you need to patch the runtime as well. Is this normal?
I don't recall other language updates mentioning runtime PTFs, only
compiler PTFs.

Notably, the RPG Cafe entry for the FOR-EACH, IN, %LIST, and %RANGE
bundle doesn't mention any runtime PTFs:

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6342821

Those strike me as more substantive changes. If anything, I would have
expected those to require an updated runtime. %LOWER, %UPPER, and
%SPLIT seem like functions that a competent and motivated RPG
programmer could implement themselves, and many *have* implemented
their own DIY versions. Granted, the DIY ones are almost always vastly
more rudimentary than these BIFs (for example, a lot of native-English
shops wouldn't bother to handle accented characters). But
conceptually, these still seem very achievable with the preexisting
runtime. Is it naive of me to think that?

John Y.
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