Re: Free format H, F, D and P specs

[Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nothing RPG specific but you're looking at it the wrong way.

The C language definition (having an ASCII heritage) uses { and } and there is no problem world-wide because as Henrik says - the code point is always the same in ASCII.

EBCDIC on the other hand does not have a fixed code point for those characters.  It was assumedly not an issue when the decision was made to allow them to "roam" because at the time IBM systems did not support C. Subsequently the addition of C and subsequently C++ and Java to IBM's arsenal caused problems with these characters. But it was too late to change EBCDIC so people have to work round the problems.

RPG has an EBCDIC heritage and has no create additional code page issues. This was a decision made back in V5 when /Free was introduced 10 years ago. wasn't going to change for this new feature now was it.

We've got an article on the new stuff coming out next week - in the meantime there's a few of our comments here: 
http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/idevelop/2013/10/as-you-may-have-already-heard-there-was-a-major-technology-refresh-tr-announcement-yesterday-check-out-fellow-blogger-st.html#comments

Here's a tiny URL for that! http://tinyurl.com/iDevelopOnTR7RPG


On 2013-10-10, at 9:47 AM, BButterworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> IBM provides C in the native environment, so it seems like using them in 
> RPG would be possible unless there is a language-specific impediment.
>
> Blake
>
>
> message: 1
> date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:45:14 +0200
> from: Henrik R?tzou <hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> subject: Re: Free format H, F, D and P specs
>
> Thomas,
>
> Presumably the reason for not using brackets is that SBCS EBCDIC brackets,
> unlike in ASCII, has a floating binary value. Brackets will make source
> code extremely CCSID sensitive.
>
> -- 
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Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com