Re: Why you shouldn't be afraid to use VARCHAR in RPGLE

On 12/10/25 8:04 PM, Barbara Morris wrote:

It's a single pass through the source but it gathers information that it can use multiple times.

The compiler usually allows forward-referencing, so you can code LIKE(x) where x is defined later.

Interesting. But note my exact words: "pure single-pass." As in compiling directly from source to executable in a single pass.

Pascal is pure single-pass. Forward-referencing is explicitly prohibited except for *very* limited circumstances, involving an *explicit* declaration as such.

Then again, when he designed Pascal (purely as a teaching language for structured programming), Niklaus Wirth had some really stupid ideas in his head. Like the notion that a FOR loop will always run to completion under normal circumstances (even though it's trivially simple to come up with cases in which FOR is the preferred loop construct, premature exit is the norm, and completion is the exception).

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JHHL