Re: /Copy books - yes or no?

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 7:29 PM, Bradley Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I use them with great enthusiasm.

Have't run into an issue with them unless you're sloppy and keep different
"versions" of them in your library list. But that's user error.

I think this is another thing that really got me when I first
encountered copy blocks. I'd just graduated from college where almost
everything was done in C. So I was no stranger to header files. But
RPG IV had not been introduced yet (at least not where I worked, and
this was before Google, so it's not like I had lots of IBM midrange
information pouring in). So they seemed kind of useless to me.

And then, on top of that, there was the very broad-but-shallow "file
system" consisting of just libraries, files, and members. Given how
shallow it was, and how rigid the shop conventions were (in large part
to cope with the shallowness), and how restrictive the green screen
and PDM/SEU were, it seemed like keeping track of copy blocks was
much, much more of a pain than keeping track of headers.

So yeah, /COPY felt simultaneously less useful and more difficult to
manage than #include, even though on some level they are the same
thing.

I will say ILE brought a lot of the C feel to RPG.

John Y.