Jon Paris
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Guru Classic: Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures
March 4, 2020 Jon Paris
When I re-read this tip while looking for a “Classic” candidate, I was reminded that the underlying issue it addresses, namely how data is actually stored in an RPG program, is one that many RPG programmers don’t really have a firm grip on. That alone made it a good candidate. But perhaps even more important is demonstrating this topic to the many new programmers coming onto the platform. Unlike those of us who started off with assembly languages, C, RPG, or COBOL, modern programmers trained in C#, Python, or PHP have never had any need to understand the mechanics of …
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Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG
March 2, 2020 Jon Paris
In this tip I’m going to address a question that arises regularly on RPG-oriented Internet lists, namely: “Is there an easy way to convert a character string to its hexadecimal equivalent?”
One answer, of course, would be to write your own routine using lookup tables, but there is a far easier way. We can take advantage of the system’s hex MI APIs. These were originally surfaced for use by C and C++ but, thanks to the joys of ILE, can be used by any ILE language. Not only that, RPG’s prototyping support makes them really easy to use. In fact, …
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Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs — Updates
February 5, 2020 Jon Paris
In my previous tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions.
%Trim: Specify Characters to Trim
Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to …
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Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs – %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)
January 8, 2020 Jon Paris
This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that most active development shops are running V7.1 and later it seems a good candidate for a “Classic” to remind readers of its capabilities. The intervening years have not dimmed its utility and it remains one of my all-time favorite BIFs.
Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through …
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Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables
August 14, 2019 Jon Paris
Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!
RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …
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Guru Classic: The New Basics — Indicators
July 17, 2019 Jon Paris
The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were added to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs.
RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need …
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Guru Classic: Where Does Data Live? The New Basics
June 19, 2019 Jon Paris
Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the data definition enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases.
Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago back in the days when D-specs were de rigueur, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here …
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Guru: 7.4 Brings New RPG Goodies
June 3, 2019 Jon Paris
As I’m sure you know by now, IBM recently announced version 7.4 of IBM i. Along with major enhancements such as Db2 Mirror, we also got a number of new RPG features. In this tip I’ll cover those that are already available in 7.3 via PTF. The 7.4-only enhancements will be covered in a subsequent tip.
Before we get into the details of the 7.3 features, just a hint of what is to come . . . 7.4 brings the long-awaited arrival of dynamic arrays known to IBM as varying dimension arrays. No more do you have to compromise between …
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Guru: Open Access To The Rescue – The Next Step
May 6, 2019 Jon Paris
I recently wrote a tip on using an Open Access handler to enable the creation of flat files in the IFS. In that version of the handler I generated a generic file name and used hard-coded record delimiters and code page settings. I mentioned at the time that I would normally supply these values at run time. In this follow-on tip I describe how the handler can be modified to use the Open Access User Parameter to facilitate this.
The User Parameter is simply specified as a second parameter to the HANDLER keyword. It can be a simple variable or, …
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Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs, %XLATE and %REPLACE
March 6, 2019 Jon Paris
Author’s Note: I’m revisiting this classic tip since the original was written back in 2009, long before the introduction of free-form data declarations. In addition, I’ve updated this tip to point to the new %SCANRPL BIF, which impacts this scenario. And, of course, I still regularly encounter RPGers who are confused by the differences between the %XLATE and %REPLACE built-in functions (BIFs). Part of that confusion of course is the result of wishful thinking on the part of those frustrated by the limitations of %XLATE!
The first thing to remember when deciding which function to use is that %XLATE operates …
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