Re: Adoption of RPG OA (Summary)

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/20/2011 5:49 PM, Vern Hamberg wrote:
> I guess I would not consider the use of OAR to be usurping an opcode. It
> does "redirect" what RPG does (or extends what RPG CAN do) when an
> opcode is specified. You also say you don't know what it is doing. I
> suggest we don't really know now what native IO is doing, either - RPG
> calls data management routines for each opcode. Now, if a handler is
> specifed, THAT is called instead of DM routines. We trust DM, we can
> learn to trust a different black box. We've learned to trust the
> blackbox that is SQL without really knowing all that it is doing.

A lot of your points are fine, but I just don't agree with this one.  I 
know EXACTLY what a CHAIN is doing - it's getting a set of fields from 
the database.  I know what it's doing, and I also know (roughly) how 
long it's going to take.  Perhaps most importantly I know that there are 
zero side effects.

Once you start adding triggers and handlers and all that, it does indeed 
turn into a black box.  And what worked one day may suddenly stop 
working because somebody touched the handler program.  Whereas yesterday 
I was just reading a file and perhaps doing a little formatting, now I 
may be calling an external program - and adding all the overhead that 
ensues.

Take it for what it's worth.  Call me a Luddite, but I just see OA as 
potentially complicating one of the things in programming that is the 
least complicated: a CHAIN to a database file.  Personally, I don't need 
a way to make a CHAIN act like a CALL when I have a perfectly good CALL 
to do it for me.

Joe