To ride The Cycle or not to ride (was Re: INZSR weirdness)

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Holden Tommy" wrote:
. . .
> Since we should all be avoiding the logic cycle (IMO) 
> *INZSR is a relic that isn't necessary.
. . .

In the first place, one of the major features of OS/400 is 
the ability to return from a called program without 
destroying its activation, then quickly and with little 
cost call it again. But such a program will almost 
certainly have costly initializations that need to be done 
on the first call, but should not (in some cases MUST not) 
be done again. How do you propose to do this without an 
INZSR?

In the second place, using The Cycle does not in any way 
require the use of a primary file, nor does it in any way 
preclude the exclusive use of full procedural files.

In the third place, if you believe you should avoid The 
Cycle at all costs, then I say you should avoid RPG at all 
costs. If AS/400 programmers had always used languages 
other than RPG for programs that made no use of The Cycle, 
then we'd probably have a lot more languages on the 
AS/400. I am sick and tired of people learning exactly one 
programming language, and calling themselves programmers. 
And if you perchance have a University degree in computer 
science, but haven't managed to learn more than one 
programming language, you ought to go to the computer 
science department of your alma mater, and demand a refund 
for your tuition, because they never should have allowed 
you to become so overspecialized.

Finally, I'm not opposed to the evolution of programming 
languages, but I AM opposed to taking languages that have 
evolved into something else beyond recognition, losing the 
distinguishing characteristics of their parent languages, 
and calling them by the names of parent languages they 
evolved from, but are no longer recognizable as. For 
example, I refuse to call any of the QBASICs or TBASICs or 
VBASICs "BASIC," because they have less in common with 
BASIC (whether you're talking Old Dartmouth, VS-BASIC, or 
Applesloth, or GW-BASIC) than they have with PL/I. 
Likewise, "RPG/Free" ought to be called something 
completely different from RPG, because it, too, has more 
in common with PL/I than with RPG. (Actually, in the 
latter case, as far as I'm concerned, it would have been a 
better use of resources for IBM to have turned OPM PL/I 
into a fully-supported ILE-based full implementation of 
the language, than to have done as they did, and stuck 
bits and pieces of it into RPG and called it "/Free.") 
When Sun decided to develop a platform-independent, 
web-safe language derived from C++, they did NOT call it 
C++-- (although the wags did); they called it something 
completely different (albeit something that showed the 
world they were drinking entirely too much coffee): They 
called it Java.

--
JHHL