3 ms·
Ask HN: RPG(/400) remake viable?
Hey everyone. I recently started working for a company that uses RPG with their customers. Me and the language have a love hate relationship. I could only use it at my workplace, and not at home on my Windows machine.
I was wondering if I should take my spare time to make a Windows version of the language, just for fun.
I'd love some input on this, lets talk. :)
- wglb 12y agoRPG as in RPG III as on system 32/34/AS400? Regarding the love/hate part, I must admit that I don't have the love part. I spent about a year programming a system 34 for my first ever consulting client. In previous gigs, I spoke loudly and often against COBOL, but when they installed COBOL on that set of machines, I was ecstatic. I wish you well in your endeavor, but this is one I will not join. It would not be pretty. But follow your bliss, and good luck.
- Doug12 12y agoYes, AS400 to be precise. I shall delve into it, not sure how it will turn out though myself. :)
- JoachimSchipper 12y agoIt seems that this already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Platforms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Platforms. The company may or may not be dead; consider sending them an e-mail. (Of course, you're free to reimplement "for fun"; just thought you might be interested in a faster path to working? software.)
- Doug12 12y agoI need to find a download for that compiler though.
- coreb 12y agoIt's not a viable product people would pay for, but I think it would be interesting as an education/academic language. There is a niche I would like to see filled for a language with data storage built-into it, but at a lower level than your SQL database's query planner. WINRPG is too expensive for a hobbiest. I appreciate what I learned from RPG-IV (never had to deal with "the cycle") and the "i" environment. If upcoming programmers had to learn to deal with their data using only loops, READ, and CHAIN commands, we'd see much better designed and optimized databases. This could fill a missing link in some CS education between building a file based index and designing a database in a RDBMS. I gave thought to starting something similar. My starting point would have been trying to hook into the Sqlite Virtual Databse Engine (http://www.sqlite.org/vdbe.html http://www.sqlite.org/vdbe.html) or the Postgres equivalent since those seemed the closest open source equivalents to an RPG program running on LUW systems.