Re: Get Start Date of a Week Number

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John

I think I can't go along with some of your concerns around using SQL 
functions. If I may say, it sounds like a desire for purity of language 
without, for me, much benefit.

If there is an SQL function that does what I want better than something 
"simple" in RPG, I'll probably use it. An example for years was the 
replace() SQL function, which replaced every instance of the search 
string with the replacement string. Until we got %scanrpl(), we had to 
do a loop to get the same capability, and it was prone to boundary-issue 
errors.

I find the matter of source member type not to have much bearing - and 
if that's the only one of the "... all kinds of dependencies...", well, 
I'd like to hear what the others are - really, I would. I run into the 
member type thing sometimes in my work, when I want to add SQL stuff to 
existing non-SQL RPG - it is an inconvenience, even in, or especially 
because of, an SCM app, where we don't usually go directly to setting 
the member type - oh, well, it's been worth it.

BTW, what are the other IBM i languages that have date math that don't 
need SQL functions? If Java, as I suppose, well, do we want to urge 
going exclusively to Java? And a lot of calls out of RPG to Java methods 
can perform not so well - look at using Scott's POI wrapper for doing 
largish spreadsheets - not too good!

Now as to SQL/PL - at 7.2 now, we have dynamic compound statements - I 
actually really like the simplicity of some database stuff in stored 
procedures, and this lets us put a LOT of SQL statements and assignments 
and all into one EXEC SQL - nice, at least, IMO.

Whew! Way too much to have said on this - gotta get to work!

Later
Vern

On 12/3/2014 7:16 AM, John E wrote:
> I agree that to be able to "tweak", in this context, has not much use (e.g.
> you want day 1 to be sunday).
>
> But if you want to use SQL for everything if there is some function
> provided, then why not throw RPG out altogether and program everthing in
> SQL/PL?
>
> It's not the "preprocessor" machinery, it's having all kinds of
> dependencies etc. For example you need to change the member type from RPGLE
> to SQLRPGLE, because you need to do some date math. When the program runs,
> the SQL runtime machinery is also initialized, just for some date maths,
> which in every other language you don't need to resort to embedded SQL
> Maybe it's optimzed that if you only call some functions it has no
> overhead, but i don't know, etc..
>
> Use SQL for DB tasks, use RPG for the rest.
-snip really long source code example-    :)