Is It Time for Free-Format?

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

"There's nothing incompatible between the cycle and /FREE". Never said they were incompatible technically. They are incompatible styles. Your next comment explains my point. "The cycle is one of the things that differentiates RPG from other languages". Exactly! But so is the fixed format! Someone who would want to shun cycle, a powerful time saving and efficient feature, would want to do so to code like other languages. By the same logic he should shun fixed format! No major language supports fixed formats. If someone is easy with fixed format, he should not abandon cycle! "If you want to ignore the cycle completely, there's less reason to choose RPG over other languages". Disagree totally. Here you prove Bob Cozzi's point that compiler developers are not application developers. In real life, outside RPG compiler team's office, there is so much code written in RPG, and for that matter in Cobol, that can not be abandoned. This legacy code is one of the major reasons AS400 and RPG is still alive. Attempts by IBM to abandon them and move to Java have failed, only met with resistance. The only thing that would work is a smooth transition. /free was one big move towards this which has halted with a big screech. Hans, I have worked in the User Centred Design and I know much before that how IBM planners work. They rely on user feed back. They wont come up with anything their loyal user wont use. Maybe they know their marketing department can not create new user /free was an experiment that met poor response. Deny this but also try to prove me wrong.

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

Tom, MR is pushing it a lot! :} It is fun to try to explain how MR works with the cycle to someone who has never seen it. Whoever designed MR was either a genius or evil or both. Tom.

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

"Someone who would want to shun cycle, a powerful time saving and efficient feature, would want to do so to code like other languages." Then, you would code in another language, not RPG. Tom.

[David Abramowitz]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

Years (and years and years and years) ago, I worked on a project where the manager insisted on using MR. The rationale was that random access was time consuming. MR was far more efficient. I never bought into it. It was the only time in my career anyone had ever attempted to control the method of coding of the programmers. It set back the entire project by a month or so. Dave

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

I used MR and NMR without any problem (25 years ago?). I had to use it a lot as I did a lot of Business Intelligence reports (Sales Analysis, Marketing Expense Analysis) that required comparing many files (Current Month, Cumlative, Last Month, Last Month Cumlative, Last Year This Month, Last Year This Month Cumlative, Last Year Cumlative ... then add same number of fields for bugets). However it were the look ahead fields that made me uneasy. However our Sr. RPG programmer really loved it.

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

"When they have to look at our code, it makes more sense to them in /free and sql." Karen, it seems you live in real world and therefore speaking of real world. Outside their box, people do not understand the importance of code readable by programmers of other platform or by the managers. I work for a Fortune 500 Phone company. Every other day they seem to take over yet another small guy and with it comes a dozen systems, especially Billing system. We have ended up with thousands of systems and adding! Integrating them is one nightmare. Before this, I was in a Fortune 500 drug company and before that a Fortune 500 disposable crockery industry. The story was same (Dixie Cup became Canada Cup became James River, became Fort-James ... now Georgia Pacific) Oh yeah AT&T (all capital) ... Bell South ... Cingular ... at&t (all capital). In this present world of corporate culture of takeovers and mergers, I do not think you and I are the only ones facing this situation. In the past decade, I have seen this as a consultant in dozens of companies, especially fortune 500 companies. "when it's time for the big system upgrade, we fight the battle of keeping the AS400 versus another way". A typpical battle we AS400 professionals fight everyday. In all the cases where the IT managers lost the battle, and their job, was when they clung to the old way. It wont let us touch the legacy code. "Dont fix it unless broken". They waited until the whole building came down. "another benefit is the experiencing of coding differently in case we make that transition". Transition is one word IBM needs to understand fully. They failed in trying to convince us to move away from RPG to Java. If only they can provide a fully free RPG and then add other things like classes etc, life would be easier in this transition to C, Java, or any language IBM wants to put us on. As for the coding standards, you would be better off following "Code Compelete". It is a cross-platform standard that I share with VB, Access, C, etc etc, guys. This way we all read each others code.

[tdaly@sddsystems.com]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

Guys guys - I was only joking! Take it easy! But seriously, if you strongly disagree with using the cycle and/or native i/o then you probably should be using other languages. Given the available choices then maybe you should be using a different platform, although there are considerations other than the languages available. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's inferior. Many many years ago I learned to walk... it's still useful. I'm not advocating arcania for it's own sake. Look-ahead fields are somewhat arcane, but the cycle is part and parcel of the language... you have to explicitly disable it. It's not arcane and it is not at all difficult to understand either, whereas MR can be tricky. Do I use SQL? Of course... when the situation warrants. The cycle? Yes, when the situation warrants. The prevailing 'correct' no-cycle-at-all-costs position is just ridiculous. Tom D.

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Code

[H.Boldt]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

Hassan wrote: ""If you want to ignore the cycle completely, there's less reason to choose RPG over other languages". Disagree totally. Here you prove Bob Cozzi's point that compiler developers are not application developers. ..." True, compiler developers aren't application developers. But you can't work with RPG for 23 years without picking up something from the application community! My point is that application development in RPG seems to be moving towards a programming model that has less and less dependence on RPG specific features. As a result, RPG programmers could just as easily do their job in another language. To illustrate my point, for argument sake, I'll present a case for doing application development in another language, C. It would seem that much new development in RPG has (at least some of) the following characteristics: SQL for database I/O; presentation using some other tool, such as JSP or PHP; program structure using procedures and modules; using C run-time library functions to make up for deficiencies in RPG; calling system API's; transaction processing using threads. For most of these practices, programming in C is preferable to RPG. C has a more compact syntax. It is totally free-form. It has strongly typed pointers, which can help find problems at compile-time rather than at run-time. (I can tell you from experience that run-time debugging of pointer problems is a real pain.) You can write re-entrant threaded functions in C, unlike in RPG. In addition, many more programmers know C than RPG, and so finding qualified staff is easier, as is finding useful resources on the net. Also, your C programs are not limited to one particular piece of hardware, as are your RPG programs. The fact that Bob Cozzi wants to be able to code parentheses in RPG's FOR statement reflects the possibility that even he might be more comfortable in C! Like I said, the previous was primarily for argument sake. I'm not advocating that people give up RPG for C. My point is that, based on current practice, RPG programmers seem to be moving more and more to C programming, and could just as easily (or better) do their job in that language. At the risk of oversimplifying things: The hardest part of the job of programming is analysis and design - the rest is just syntax. Cheers! Hans

[Guest.Visitor]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

I checked this out at Amazon and noticed a 2nd edition. Have you seen it? Is it beneficial to have both? I can get a used copy of the original for under $2 plus shipping. I am willing to do both unless it's redundant or the 1st is completely outdated.

[OzzieH]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

"I think everyone here knows that it is my primary concern that the green screen is the issue with iSeries, not the programming language. " --Bob Cozzi I'm just a technician in a cubicle, but really, what are you /free bigots partaking of after hours?! You wanna code in /Free? Go for it. You wanna code Columnar? Do it already. If you think that any user, at any level of an organization, gives a rat's behind about HOW we make the systems do what they do, especially if the "fortune 500" tag follows you everywhere you go, you're nutz. The only thing that matters to users is their ability to interact with a system effectively and to have a system produce results that help them manage their day-to-day activities. Nobody except geeks, and I mean NOBODY, gives a hoot about your preferred programming language, your coding style, your ILE expertise, etc. And they darned sure don’t care about whether or not you use the /free or columnar style of RPG. I’m thinking here. Observe a new employee, as they sit down for the first time in front of their computer. All the usual productivity tools are there, Office, Email, etc. Now, watch them become visibly nauseous after they log on to run the enterprise apps, with CLIENT ACCESS. Invariably, the user makes some derogatory reference about the interface. What can you possible say to that user? I GOT IT: “Don’t let the interface fool you---the underlying programs are all coded in RPG using /free.” I liken all this to an episode a few years back. My boss hires a new programmer, a well educated, well-paid, highly-recommended fellow from the big Apple. After breezing through his first projects, he was assigned part of the dreaded y2k conversion. He walks into my boss’ office one day, about quittin’ time, and precedes to explain what he’s been working on. “I’ve noticed that a lot of programs don’t have their IF/DO blocks ending with their matched ENDIF/ENDDO statements. They all end with END. I’ve wrote a program that will spin through all of our source files, change the source, and recompile.” What I heard next was the loudest chewing out session I have ever witnessed. He was programmer #3 in our shop. #1 and #2 (that would be me) were huddled in a cubicle shrugging our shoulders. We had prior knowledge of what #3 was doing and warned him not to pursue, but he was confident that his new boss would see the genius of his programming abilities AND proactivity. It was not a pretty site at the time, but looking back, I just have to say, “That’s funny right thare, I don’t care who you are.”

[J.Pluta]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

Tom wrote:

Do I use SQL? Of course... when the situation warrants. The cycle? Yes, when the situation warrants. The prevailing 'correct' no-cycle-at-all-costs position is just ridiculous.

This is right on the mark. The same can be said of the "all SQL, no native I/O" mentality. In fact, in my recent article -- http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?1@23...T.17@.6b385c99 -- I believe I used the term "insane". There are a lot of people pushing technologies these days. I'm not always sure who is right, but I know two sure signs that someone is wrong: 1. They tell you that you should never use some technique. This technique is of course always diametrically opposed to whatever they're selling. The "SQL only" crowd is a prime example of this, as is the "Pure Java" constituency. A classic symptom: they'll tell you that whatever weakness you point to in their chosen technology (such as performance) "isn't significant" -- the SQL zealots use this a lot. 2. They tell you what is "best" for your company ... without having any idea what your company does, what your code base looks like, or what skill set your staff has (much less trying to get a feel for your future needs). These are more the "platform independent" folks or as Jeff says, the lowest common denominator people who tell you not to use things because not all languages have them. Often these people have a cross-platform product or service to sell and are trying to market it to the broadest audience -- they don't know how the platform-specific stuff works, so by definition it must be bad. In any case, it's up to you what works best and why. I just got done doing an intense training session on JSP Model II with an SQL interface to a DB2 database. I don't think it's the best architecture, but thanks to IBM's lack of interest it may be the only way to keep the iSeries in that particular market niche at all, and because of that, it's the best solution for that client. But to say "never use" any technology, from the cycle to OPNQRYF, is shortsighted in the extreme. Joe

[AppDesigner]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

But see, your CL example is perfect for the subject to illustrate exactly why free-format is much better! For example, in CL, you can line up the DCL's in columnar fashion if you want to, or not! In fact, sometimes I wish there was a way to set the prompting to return some flexible indentations or some such, but it would be complex to set up.. Same in RPGIV with /FREE syntax. I would love a complete free-format RPG, with D-specs and all, fantastic. It could even be set up on the DCL model. Something like a choice of formats and syntax even, like: Def CustAccount dec 10,0 ; Define CustAccount decimal (10,0) inz(4567) Define Var(CustAccount) Type(decimal) len(10,0) inz(4567) woo-hoo! Keywords or not, fantastic! Love it! --Alan

[AppDesigner]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

From Ralph: "Devoting IT and business people to rewriting, retesting, revalidating, reauditing, and reinstalling production software because a programmer contends it will be easier for him to make future changes is not one of them." I would say that there is often the case to make for this. While I appreciate IBM's sensitivity to development budgets among its midrange customers, as in making everything so comprehensively forward-compatible (upgrades don't break old code), sometimes it's productive to make such changes. FOr exmample, if a program is written in RPG-II, especially if it's the older spaghetti-heavy stuff, if I have to touch it, I would make every possible case to convert for bottom-line reasons. And there's another very compelling reason to strongly encourage RPG programmers to "get with the program", and that is that the inertia of the body of programmers and managers that don't want to move forward with the enhancements to the language are a big drag, a big giant drag, on the rest of us. I was recently at a shop where the code was RPG-III, but the former chief was entirely clueless with new stuff and demanding everything be in RPG3 so he could read it! So almost none of the code there was even RPGIV syntax, let alone /free, or taking advantage of service programs, anything! So forget about serving up web pages, they weren't even using service programs! I wrote their first one. One guy there, otherwise a sharp programmer, said he would just write up a program to call instead. Thank God I'm at a shop now that pretty much encourages new techniques, but even there they have some Windows programmers who I suspect are doing things we could be doing on the meat-and-potatoes iSeries systems set up, but there's just this inertia thing. And neither managers or programmers are aware of some of the things we could do from the iSeries. On the subject of future stuff, on my wish list is a native GUI on for the iSeries. It's set up to be able to use ASCII terminals (at least with ASCII controllers). At the company where I work presently, all the users have Windows systems, and they are heavy Windows users , but another company that recently consolidated me out of my position was replacing the terminals that died with thin clients instead of 5250s. Hooray! Now I think that's the future of the iSeries, and I like the idea of serving it all up from our native system. --Alan

[AppDesigner]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

David posted: "Years (and years and years and years) ago, I worked on a project where the manager insisted on using MR..... The rationale was that random access was time consuming. MR was far more efficient." Me: ..At the time, I'll bet it was way far more efficient than the alternative, at least for some programs. I was at one shop where they were trying to cut down the time for a report that was even already using a primary-file read, because for one client it was taking longer than 24 hours!!! Lo and behold, the primary file was a header file and it was getting all the detail lines with SETLL, READE and all that with each header record. The programmer finally just made it a secondary file with MR and cut the time down to 2 to 3 hours!! But nowadays with the better hardware and all, I would advocate pretty much avoiding programming to the cycle, because I had to deal with so many requests for changes that required splitting it out from cycle logic. Where fields have to be compared, it's all easy, when you read into a prefixed data structure, to preview it, you get all the benefits of lookahead fields, and a way to check for "level-breaks" and all that too... That said, though, when queries and SQL joins came around I thought back to MR and said (only to myself!!) that RPG was in some ways even ahead of its time! --Alan

[AppDesigner]

Is It Time for Free-Format?

From Os: "____There's only one comment in this whole thread that makes sense to me ....."I think everyone here knows that it is my primary concern that the green screen is the issue with iSeries, not the programming language. " --Bob Cozzi.. ... ....If you think that any user, at any level of an organization, gives a rat's behind about HOW we make the systems do what they do, especially if the "fortune 500" tag follows you everywhere you go, you're nutz.__" I agree completely that RPG programmers have to get out of the green screen straight-jacket already!!! No-brainer! However, that's not the only factor, for sure. Sometimes you just get a Windows bigot for a new executive and he doesn't know the difference. A non-techie at a business school gets instruction in his spreadsheets from a guy who can't stand green-bar report strictures and wants his reports that way. Plus in the vast majority of midrange-RPG shops I've been in, there have been two and three sets of F-key standards at work! And Cozzi gets kudos for his very early advocacy of a GUI programming format for all us RPG-ers! With his own program, which I thought about buying (because I was the Lone Ranger programmer at the time where I was and I could), but it was just after it was freed up. For WDSC they told me they need to set it up at work, I haven't worked with it, I suspect it's easy to get set up and work with it? And is Cozzi's GUI-interface for programming still out there and freebie? I was saddened at his article about giving up on selling it.. because Cozzi deserves his income! And may I plug his books again here too? I had all my RPG students buy it, more as a reference than a classroom text (for which I used my own stuff, sorry!). And Cozzi's books still beat the pants off IBM's pubs for a straightforward and comprehensive reference, even for newbies to learn the ins and outs from. Because, among other things, he gives all the disparate pieces to make it work. Like subfiles. Try writing your first subfile referring to IBM's RPG Programmer's Guide! --Alan