By Paul Tuohy

Another year and another set of RPG enhancements. As always, the reactions range from "I'm not sure how that applies to me" to "This is downright intriguing."

As my teammate Jon Paris mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the IBM documentation we have seen to date seems to be placing a strange emphasis on which enhancements are most pertinent. But in fairness to IBM (now there is a novel thought), I think most of the documentation simply follows the order of RPG specifications. In this article, I will attempt to guide you through the enhancements in the order I think is most pertinent. Feel free to disagree.

By Bruce Vining

System APIs use a language-neutral convention when defining the type and size of data that is to be used as a parameter or a subfield of a data structure. A typical API parameter list would be the Retrieve Member Description QUSRMBRD API shown below and documented here.