Jon wrote:
Me - I'm excited by the prospects, if for no other reason that
it is a recognition by IBM that RPG needs to move forward to
survive/thrive and they can't do it all."
Jon: I know I may be accused of negativism, but I'm having trouble making
sense of the information currently available on this "Open I/O" concept.
I'm sure all will be revealed in due course, but here are my thoughts:
But first, back when I was part of the RPG development team, we bandied
about the idea of beefing up support for SPECIAL files. There are a couple
of obvious possible enhancements in that area: Externally described files,
support for procedures, and support for the keyed I/O operations. At the
time, other priorities pushed these things off to the back burner.
Now then, I see two possible ways this "Open I/O" could be implemented.
First, it could be enhancements to SPECIAL files as described above, or it
could be hooks at the data management layer in the O/S. Either way, you're
still just passing some buffer of information to or from some other
program.
My concerns: First, what is the advantage of "Open I/O" over just calling
a procedure directly to do the I/O?
Second, the word "Open" is, of course, a popular buzz word that may elicit
many different concepts. Although improved SPECIAL file support may add
some nice syntactical sugaring, is the enhancement really such a big deal
as the word "Open" might imply? Or is the use of the word "Open" merely a
marketing strategy?
Cheers! Hans
midrange.com
