Re: Upcoming spring 2021 RPG enhancements announced today

On Sat, Apr 17, 2021 at 12:55 PM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

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.

So my naivety is that I have a different concept of what "runtime"
entails. But it's also the case that this is an inherently fuzzy term,
with different language implementations putting different kinds of
"stuff" into their respective "runtimes".

In particular, there are functions which in some language
implementations would be considered part of the "standard library" but
in others would be part of the runtime. As far as I know, RPG doesn't
even have a standard library to speak of, so it makes sense that there
would be a whole bunch of "library-ish" functions that go into the
runtime.

John Y.