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 …

Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 2

July 17, 2019 Paul Tuohy

As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles was originally published in March 2009. The content of the articles has been updated for free form RPG.

In this article I will take a look at the basic rules and coding requirements for using commitment control within RPG programs.

A Database

This is the SQL used to create a schema named COMMIT, which contains two related tables called HEADER and DETAILS.

(A)  CREATE SCHEMA "COMMIT" ;

(B)  CREATE TABLE COMMIT/HEADER (
     	"KEY" CHAR(2) CCSID 37 NOT NULL DEFAULT '' ,