Should RPG code be long form or short form? I’ve been working on an interesting project focused on taking some old RPG code and re-factoring it to make it more efficient. Fascinating work for a client that is focused on doubling its IBM i throughput and reducing the CPU load of all its old programs.

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Write Clean RPG Code This morning I was revisiting a program that I wrote last year and looking at my code thinking “Why the hell did I write it like that? #Ugly”. RPG code evolves and lots of code evolution starts in one direction and then branches off, drunkenly in another direction. This means that

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Source code line number sequencing in Rational Developer for IBM i Updating a source member and adding a bunch of lines will re-sequence the line numbers by default. Turning re-sequencing *OFF lets us clearly see added, deleted or changed blocks of code. We can set this on the exit line of SEU and also if

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Naughty Special Characters – from Dollars to Pounds. Another IBM I Developer was having this weird problem with an IFS file. Trying to figure out the code page problems with a file that had been emailed from a British IBM i Server. naughty special characters- Java and IBMi might get upset! When the Java QSHELL command

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Over the last year I’ve been using SQL more and more for all my RPG file access needs. The more I use it the more I like it and I’m building my own little set of reusable components and settled in with some naming standard that work for me. I thought I would enter them

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