Re: "RPG isn't cool" (was: Re: IBM Secret)

["Phil Hall" <hallp@xxxxxxxx>]

Bob,

: I've been giving an open source RPG to C [translator|precompiler].
It
: doesn't seem too difficult, just time consuming.  The issues for
: portability (and why do it without portability) to me seem to be the
: external file descriptions, and the screen handling system.  I
suppose
: both could just be unhandled in the language and require external
calls,
: but that kindof defeats the purpose.  Anybody else given this some
thought?

As for providing a portable solution to screen & file handling, this
is, obviously more involved than people think. One solution would be
to have a runtime support framework, that would be able to render the
screen or access the database for each particular platform, i.e. for
Unix you would mimic the screens using the curses library, on Win9x/NT
you would use the console API's but the interface to either method
would be the same, so that the C code generated from the RPG could run
unchanged on either platform. For data file handling, again this would
probably be best done coding to intermediate API layer (which you
would write) which would insulate you from the underlying platform
database implementation.

It's do-able (and I would be interested in putting some time into it,
as the other open source project 'WyattERP' is not something that my
present employer would let me work on - I work for a ERP company ! )
but it will not be a two week project !

ILE/C certainly handles all of the AS/400 files types, some better
than others, perhaps a small project in converting the RPG into ILE/C
with ILE/C using the Dynamic Screen API's. This would end up giving a
closer representation of the work needed on other platforms for the
screen handling support

--phil


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