In our clan of gray haired AS400 and iSERIES programmers, we all have roots in the good old RPG LOGIC CYCLE. We have one foot in the old world of huge programs with tens of thousands of lines written in a very start-middle-end style, often with many subroutines. The other foot is in the modern

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What is an RPG language HELLO WORLD program? A “Hello, World!” program is a simple computer program that outputs or displays the iconic phrase “Hello, World!” to a user. This humble program serves as a fundamental introduction to programming languages and illustrates their basic syntax. Let’s explore this tradition further: The “Hello, World!” program typically

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RPG Subprocedure Tips and Techniques The use of subprocedures in your applications should be on everyone’s “to do” list this year. You don’t need to drop everything and rewrite your applications to take advantage of subprocedures and many other benefits that the Integrated Language Environment (ILE) offers.  However, when writing new applications or performing major

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Count with SQLRPGLE Variable File Name Been having fun with SQL and RPG ILE this afternoon… the question was “How do I find out if and how many policies exist in one of the reservation files for a given customer code?” Obviously, we could write a little piece of RPGLE doing a READ LOOP and

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Pattern Recognition: Ease Modern RPG Programming This morning I was reviewing the IBM i Redbook on application modernization, converting this massive PDF into an easy readable TOPIC based format in my AS400 and iSeries modernization course. I found a couple of problems with the internet. Yep, the internet is broken. The ebook has a couple

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Rules for good coding style I started this with the idea of writing a blog about “Rules for good RPG coding style”, I was discussing this with an old friend and colleague yesterday. He moved away from the AS400 machine, just as it was being replaced with the old iSeries machine. He’s now spent nearly

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Free Form RPG ILE Logic Example I was recording a screencast about modernizing some old RPG400 to ILE RPG this morning and had to knock up this little code example showing the difference between legacy RPG400 code and modern RPG ILE code. Note, this is not an example of good code (it’s crappy old RPG

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Developerworks Connections is dead As I was waffling this morning about the sad demise of IBM Developerworks Connections Wiki – here is another excellent article that discusses various extensions to IBM Rational Developer for IBM i – How to Extend RDi (#RDi) So here it is, re-posted before IBM can hide this wonderful source of

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I was discussing the benefits of RDi with a colleague this morning (I’m a bit of a Rational Developer fanboy) because he is trying to justify the huge annual cost of the tool with The Management: nearly $1000 per year per person! A price tag that is #bloodypreposterous. But, I will rant about that in

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Going the (Levenshtein) Distance Over on the RPG Cafe website, a nice chap called Smit Dixit published a sample of his RPGLE code calculating the Levenshtein distance between two words. What is the Levenshtein Distance? The Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words

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Fun with RPGLE Strings I was emailed a little IBM i programming question this morning: An input parameter @Account is a 100 character string for one to x number of 8 digit accounts separated with a comma (,). Each account can be entered with commas between each account. Example: The string @Account could be “123,00574,

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