Re: Performance of ODBC vs. other access methods

["George Kinney" <GKinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Richter wrote:
> How much better would RPG be if its arrays
> were boundless, the index could be a key value and each entry of the
> array could itself contain a boundless array? It would be great, but
> it takes a lot of CPU to support such a thing.

If it takes a lot of CPU to support, then why am I provided with simple access 
to such data structures on my PC via several languages: Python, Ruby, Java, 
C++, C#, etc? (even though they all call them different names)

A 'boundless' array is just a linked list, and providing keyed access to the 
entries just requires adding a hash-table to marry up the keys with the list 
indicies.

You *could* easily implement all this in ILE RPG, even though it'd be nice if 
the compiler provided a couple of key words to hide the gory implementation 
details.

But there really is no reason to since its been possible to implement all this 
via plain vanilla indexed physical files all along.