[Gambas-user] OT:Very nice compliments for gambas :))

[Hans-Martin Bundeshund]

Am Dienstag, 24. August 2004 22:25 schrieb Michael Sullivan:
> Text has to be entered in specific column positions?  Sounds like RPG
> (unfortunately it has nothing to do with popular games like Final
> Fantasy.)  I had to take a semester of RPG at college a few years ago.
> It was easy, sort of.  It seemed mostly stupid, since I also learned VB
> and COBOL at that college  I really hated the column restriction
> though...
>
>
Yes, it is RPG. Far as I know there were 3 big evaluation steps: RPG, RPGIII 
and ILE-RPG. 

Easy is relative. It is a bit comparing to assembler. For example the 'move'- 
or 'cmp'-commands are used in this way: (20|21|22 are some flags/boolean 
which can be on or off, dependimg on the result of the CoMPare-comand, or set 
by a move-command: *on move *IN20)


0815  C         1                 MOVE           MYVAR    1 0
0816  C         MYVAR         CMP             1                 202122
0817  C 20     0                 Z-ADD          MYVAR

which means:  

MYVAR as Integer
IN20 as Boolean

MYVAR = 1
If MYVAR = 1 Then 
 IN20 = TRUE
ENDIF

If IN20 = TRUE Then
 MYVAR = 0
ENDIF

Since a few year there is an 'eval'-command. You can use it like:

0815  C                   EVAL     MYVAR = 0

This is a great feature in ILE-RPG  ;)  
And You can use embedded SQL, but very uncomfortable. Each field has to be 
declared in the programm header before. Using a SQL-join with 30 fields is 
not that fun. All output must be written to a file. There are display-files 
for the dialoge, printer-files for printing or spoolfiles for storing and 
viewing/printing the data. All that files have to be compiled before you can 
link them into your RPG-Programm.


Sorry of to be such OT and sorry for whining, but only for you lucky people 
out there, who don't know that some of us must use some real horrobly 
programming language and enviroments nearly all day. (The most time I have to 
fix or dilate old programms (up tol 15 years old). I want to rewrite them, 
but this is undisired)  ;))

HM