Re: WDSCI and EGL

From: Jon Paris

>> One of the hard pieces would be linking the debugger with the
high-level code.

Don't see why Joe - after all when they W-code form RPG they map it out
just fine.

I just had this discussion offline as well - it would mean the EGL team
would have to work with (and acknowledge) the System i. Yes, all the work
is pretty much there in the RSE, but I get the feeling that the EGL team
would rather pluck out their own eyeballs than consider ILE as a strategic
component. I could be wrong, but that's the sense I get.

>> I've yet to figure out whether it would generate actual indexed I/O
for COBOL.

Its predecessors always did and I've no reason to believe the code gen
engine is significantly different.

Sure, but did the previous target versions of COBOL support embedded SQL?
I'm asking out of ignorance, I really don't know.

>> Yes, I suppose so, although having the source does make it easier to
debug.

Well when we debug RPG we work from the RPG. When we work from EGL surely
we should debug in EGL - regardless of what intermediate representation
was
used en-route to the run time. I used to use the old MI listings of
RPG/400
and COBOL/400 to help debug problems - but since the ILE versions came out
I
haven't had that option - and frankly have never missed it.

I was discussing Java code. I'm not sure I'd want to debug EGL-generated
byte code. Since EGL is not an OO language, I'd be a lot more comfortable
dealing with the inheritance issues using the generated Java.

Generated W-code is a different issue. I can see debugging from the EGL
level, but as I point out this would require a cooperation between the EGL
and ILE teams that simply doesn't exist today.

And of course, the ability to use a higher-level language for debugging
depends very much on how stable and bug-free the generator is. But just
like a Java byte code decompiler would probably make a good last-resort
debugging tool for generated byte code, a W-code decompiler could do the
same for generated W-code.

Notice that this presupposes using EGL as an RPG replacement. In my case, I
just want a thin UI layer and calls to RPG, so I need a lot less for the
short term. Since my UI is JSF, I am happy with a thin generated Java
layer. This discussion is really more about the future of EGL as a real
business language, and I'm not yet comfortable enough with the language to
know whether I like it as a replacement for RPG.

Joe