RE: Need for separate Input and Output Areas in Display File

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Winchester Terry
>
> Well, I think ILE/RPG has some pretty neat stuff that COBOL
> does rather poorly.  Too bad the best features of both
> languages couldn't be merged together :)

Of course, the idea behind ILE is that you CAN merge the languages, at least
to some extent.  I don't know if you can nicely segment the pieces - for
example, with all the wonderful BIFs, ILE/RPG now is a decent string
handling language.  Can you invoke ILE/RPG procedures from COBOL the same
you can in RPG?

That way, you might have an editing routine in RPG that returns a formatted
string.  Personally, I'm partial to RPG's display file handling; I might use
RPG for my skeleton and also for various service procedures (accessing APIs,
for instance, or the string handling I mentioned) and then write much of the
business logic in COBOL.

Interesting stuff, lemme tell ya.

Joe