Re: Advantages of RPG

[Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24/06/2008, at 1:56 AM, Aaron Bartell wrote:

> I am doing a little COBOL these days and there are a handful of  
> small things
> that drive me nuts that I take for granted in RPG.
>
> For example, I have to first clear a string variable before I apply a
> literal value to it in the event the last string was longer than  
> the one I
> am putting in.  I would love to hear I am doing something wrong and  
> there is
> an easier way :-)

You used to have to do that in RPG too, remember. Then we got MOVE(P)  
and later EVAL. Investigate USAGE IS NATIONAL for your character data  
types. A MOVE into a NATIONAL data type is supposed to be padded with  
the character specified on the NTLPADCHAR option of the PROCESS  
directive. Of course, this means using UCS-2 data in your program  
which may not be what you want.

MOVE X to Y WITH SPACE PADDING would be nice. SPACE could be any  
character.

>            MOVE SPACES TO var1.
>            STRING var2 DELIMITED BY SIZE,
>              "somestring" DELIMITED BY SIZE
>              INTO var1.
>            CALL PROCEDURE "RPG_CODE" USING
>              var1 RETURNING isError.
>
> That makes for a lot of extra coding in my COBOL program that I  
> don't have
> in RPG.
>
> I would love it if I could instead do the following:
>
> CALL PROCEDURE "RPG_CODE" USING trimr(var2) + var1 RETURNING isError.

That's not quite the same as your STRING code is doing.

From the COBOL Language Reference:

	o Each USING identifier must be defined as a level-01 or level-77  
item in the
	  Linkage Section of the called subprogram

so I think you'll never see what you want in COBOL without some major  
changes to the language.r

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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