V5R3 Gotcha / case sensitive program calling in RPG

[M.Savino]

What if the Pgm Name is in a Variable in Lower Case ?? Don't see why the results wouldn't be the same but just to cover all the bases. And for folks that still insist that they can enter the Call with a pgm name in Lower Case; Is there any chance that you're using a pre-compiler or something that's translating to Upper Case and creating a Temp Src Mbr before compiling? Or are you just taking a 14 from PDM or what? And if you do use a 14, are you sure that the CRTXXX commands being used are the ones that were shipped by IBM? Maybe one of your Application Vendors pulled the old Switcherooo.

[Guest.Visitor]

At first I regretted making this post. But I certainly appreciate the programmer/analyst desire to be absolutely positively correct. I would hate to be wrong, but more importantly want to know what is going on here. It is confusing nonetheless...and I'll give a little more background on my situation, just in case it's important; The program code I cut and pasted for the lowercase example was my own. It wasn't the prettiest CALL from an RPG, didn't use a procedure, etc... but interfacing an old vendor program to a new program it was the quick way to get the job done. This calling program was compiled as an RPGLE sometime last year under V4R5. Why did I even used lowercase?, well, I guess because I was used to typing it in the source statements and because it looked 'prettier'. I swear it had been working just fine until this week. We've been on V5R3 for over a month, but we just replaced some vendor code that required me to recompile this program on Monday. Sooooo, the problem did not crop up the day we switched to V5R3, but rather, the day I recompiled it under V5R3. Could this mean that it's the compiler under the OS that translated lower to upper differently under V5R3 than it did previously? (Rather than the sudden switch in OS versions.) In my surprise I shared this with my fellow programmer and he felt alarmed as well. However, we haven't run into any more code like this (yet). I agree with Glen, it would seem silly that is is case sensitive since we can't name an object in a library with lower case. But I can understand interfacing with the IFS, etc... where case sensitivity is more important. One thing is for certain. I'm going to change my ways, and be more conscious of this little 'gotcha'. Thanks for all the feedback everyone.

[Greybeard400]

Come on folks. It doesn't matter what was. Only what is. Since we can now call Java classes from RPG IV, it's a good habit to get into case sensitivity. It will save grief in the long run. It's a good idea to put your called program and procedure names in D-Spec variables any way. That way you can do what you wish with the variable names.

[Guest.Visitor]

Hey everyone, I just encountered a problem I thought I'd share. Perhaps someone has already mentioned it in an article, but my quick search found no such mention. What happened was this; I had to recompile a program because a file structure changed on a file used in that program. (preventing a level check problem.) The logic was unaffected, so a simple recompile was all that was needed. However, after the compile there was suddenly a new error, the call to another program from within this program resulted in an "Object not found" message. I was confused. The object was there, in the right library, and the library list was alright. Finally, I was skeptical, but changed the call from lower case to upper case like so; ------------------------------------------------------------ old code here - note the lower case program name. call 'dsapi02r' parm parm1 parm parm2 new code here - note the only change is to upper case. call 'DSAPI02R' parm parm1 parm parm2 ------------------------------------------------------- After this change, the program call worked! It appears that we need to start paying attention to case when compiling in V5R3.

[Guest.Visitor]

Could it be that that the source member went though an imperfect conversion program to change everything to lower case (even values between quotes) without re compiling?