Re: Sources for External Data Structures

[Mark Lazarus <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx>]

Hans,

>Hi John!  I'm rather bummed out about the EDS DFT function myself, so
>you don't have to sell me on the requirement.  If it's any consolation,
>this should be a big priority for the next release.  (Who knows, maybe
>we can squeeze it back into this release, but that's not very likely.)

 The sooner the better.

>Regarding varying length char fields, this has been in DDS for a long
>time.  Maybe few use it since the languages never supported it well?
>Now, with this new release, there will be no DDS data types that are
>not supported by RPG.  Before ILE RPG, string manipulation was a major
>pain in the (um, er) language.  The situation improved tremendously with
>expressions in ILE RPG.  In fact, intermediate string results in
>expressions were kept in character varying form right from the start!
>But until now, we had no way of maintaining a varying length char
>value from one expression to another.  The varying length types should
>make string manipulation even easier.

 Performance, utilities (i.e. Query), disk space are some other concerns.

>Our goal since the initial design of ILE RPG was to minimize the need
>to refer to those old-style, cryptically named 2 digit indicators.
>With the INDDS, as well as the new indicator BIF's (%EOF, %ERROR, etc),
>there are only a few places left where the old-style indicators are
>needed.  (LOOKUP, SHTDN, and the TESTx opcodes.)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^         
 When will these remnants be cleaned up?

 -mark

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