RPG and Programming

Sometimes the frustration you get from programming stems from a lack of knowledge. You think you have a mastery of a particular programming task, but the lack of knowledge comes back to bite you.

Such was the case a few weeks ago. I was debugging a program, and I wanted to to check the results of a basic calculation. I had changed the processing to no longer use a particular field. This field was defined in the input specifications (it was not externally defined). As I stepped through the calculations, I wanted to check the field, so on the command line I entered EVAL FIELD1. The result? It was blank.

I said to myself, “This is ridiculous- it can’t be!” It was part of the key to the file, and the file had no blank keys. I checked the value of KEY1, which included FIELD1 (that is, it included the data in the record encompassed by FIELD1. It looked normal. This was exasperating. I know that data in input specifications are stored in different areas of memory, even if they describe the same spot in the data record. But the field was blank. There were other fields that encompassed the same record space; some were blank, some weren’t.

I was vaguely aware that there was some sort of keyword in the H specifications you could use to eliminate unreferenced fields. But that would mean that I shouldn’t be able to debug it at all; it should give an error if I tried to EVAL it. And I didn’t use that keyword. I had one of my fellow programmers look over my shoulder as I ran the program in debug again. He didn’t have any idea what was going on either.

After all of this, we brainstormed a bit. I had no reason to suspect it before, but we thought: what if it is not showing up in debug because it is not being used? We could find nothing in the IBM RPG language documentation that something like that is done; but I inserted a dummy calculation: EVAL FIELD1=FIELD1.

Voila! The field now showed up, filled with data, in debug.

The most disagreeable part of it all was that I couldn’t find this behavior described anywhere in the documentation. I spent a little time Googling the situation – and sure enough, others described this behavior of the debugger. Apparently it is some kind of attempt to optimize the debugger. If you don’t use the field, the value is not filled in the debugger.

My reaction was, “Why bother?” Why assume that, just because another line of code doesn’t reference it, that I’m not interested in it? (This is an old program, by the way.) If the field is part of the file’s definition, it should be assumed that I’m interested in its value. I haven’t been able to find the documentation in a text document that describes how to use the debugger. The documentation may say something about it – if there is documentation. I couldn’t find anything in the help text for the debugger that described my situation. And I would think that a debugger, which deliberately allows you to sit at a line of code as long as you want, would be the last and least thing you would need to have optimized.

But all of this speaks to a larger issue. Is this system getting too big? Is there any person around that actually knows everything about the behavior of the RPGIV compiler and its supporting programs, like the debugger? I don’t mean someone who knows where to look for the information (assuming of course that it’s even all written down), but someone who actually knows all this stuff, right down into all of the nooks and crannies, like this thing with the debugger, where some programmer or low-level committee apparently arbitrarily decided that we didn’t need to see the value of an unreferenced field in the debugger? If such a person exists, hide him from the world for six months and make him update the manuals so they include everything IN A COMPREHENSIBLE AND COMPREHENSIVE FORMAT.

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions. I don’t pretend to know the solutions to these problems. Maybe I’m just stupid. Maybe I just don’t know where to look. But I have for some time labored under the delusion that I have some measurable level of intelligence and that it shouldn’t be this hard to figure these things out.

This is a rant without a suggested solution. I can’t write my own compiler or supporting documentation. But it just strikes me that when Niklaus Wirth and a colleague can write a non-trivial graphical operating system (Oberon) in just over 12000 lines of code in under 200K of space, other people just as smart could make these systems we work with (possibly) smaller and (certainly) more comprehensible. Maybe it’s too late. I hope not.

The rather slow acceptance of freeform RPG since its inception has been intriguing to me. For that reason, a recent discussion on  the RPGIV forum has been interesting. Bob Cozzi, a well-known RPG expert, posed a question about how long it took to actually code the implementation of freeform to Hans Boldt, who evidently was on the team at IBM that developed the original implementation.
Hans said that it only took about 1 PM (person month?) to actually code it, but considerably more time was spent in planning. I can believe this. The planning discussions must have been particularly interesting.
One of the biggest things that have slowed acceptance of freeform was the non-implementation of MOVE and MOVEL. This is also the opinion of Cozzi and others in the field. Mr. Boldt touched on this and other issues.
Boldt’s first design included implementation of all opcodes. Others in the group, one in particular, argued vociferously against it. Boldt eventually came around to their way of thinking. As he said, “That design point meant we didn’t have to worry about those goofy multi-part factors.”  (I’m not clear on what that means, exactly. But anyway…..)
Once that was established it was just a matter of deciding which to implement and which not. GOTO was thrown out because, as stated in Nicklaus Wirth’s famous title for Edsger Dijkstra’s article on GOTO, “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”. I could quibble about that, but since it’s been probably 4 or 5 years since I last put a GOTO in a program, there wouldn’t be much point in arguing.
With MOVEL and MOVE however, Mr. Boldt doesn’t understand why people are so attached to those opcodes. He says, “It’s hard to see how these opcodes can be missed given the other options available by free-form opcodes.”
To a certain extent, I agree with his comments. I myself have used MOVE/MOVEL very seldom in the last several years. New opcodes have for the most part been very workable. Using EVAL and many BIFs, I get along very nicely. When EVAL gets a little tedious, I often create data structures to put together data in the desired patterns.
The problem is, I am talking about new code. Old code from the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s did not have all this neat stuff available. About all you had for data manipulation was MOVE and MOVEL, along with their cousin MOVEA, along with perhaps data structures. From my observations over the years, I would say most programmers did not avail themselves of the help even data structures could provide; they did their work with MOVE(L). We are not talking about an easily disposable opcode like FORCE; we are talking about opcodes that appeared in almost every non-trivial RPG program before RPGIV, and most of the trivial ones. They used the opcodes to change data types (from alphanumeric to numeric and back). Above all, they used MOVE to manipulate strings, piecing together long strings from five or six (or more) smaller ones. One can complain that this is a very kludgy way of doing things, but this is all we had to work with. I would suspect that there are millions, if not tens of millions, of MOVEs in the legacy code sitting on today’s AS/400s (or whatever we’re supposed to be calling them today).
So what do we do in freeform once MOVE is taken away from us? As pointed out in the post I referenced yesterday or the day before, we must choose among 10 or 15 alternatives, depending on what we want to do - which in a sense is a demonstration of the power of the opcode. There is no easy conversion; it is not the same thing as changing  KEY   CHAIN    MASTER  to CHAIN KEY MASTER; . I don’t think even artificial intelligence could do even close to a good job of determining the best conversion; Linoma tried, but some MOVEs are just untranslatable without human eyes and brains to analyze them.
Therein lies the problem. If you rule out MOVE in freeform, a human must determine the best way to translate it to freeform. It simply isn’t financially practical to spend resources changing massive amounts of fixed-format code to freeform by hand, and the utilities available for automatic conversion do not do a clean job. You can use Linoma’s software; you can use Websphere’s conversion facility, which does not handle the MOVE and does not even attempt to do the indentation; there may be other utilities around. In the end, to convert legacy code, you can convert it to a degree automatically, but you will still be left with MOVEs to contend with by hand. You end up with ugly flipflops between free and fixed format that may even be harder to read and deal with than the original fixed format code.
It is very nice to say, that when we modify a program, we will also change it to freeform. But that is a slow way of converting what might be hundreds, or even thousands, of programs on your system. Remember, converting a MOVE to something else is not the same as reformatting a CHAIN; it must be carefully tested.
So, while freeform may ultimately win out, it could have been done a lot more readily if MOVE had been implemented in freeform. The more I think about it, I wonder if someone’s ego got in the way, someone who said, “I am going to teach these plebeians how programming SHOULD be done, instead of using these operations that no other reputable programming language uses.”  (Down, XFOOT, down!!!  Don’t bite him!)
And to think it could have been avoided by allowing the conversion of  MOVE  STRING1   STRING2  to the freeform equivalent:  move   string1    string2.

I finally found the article I read back in the 80’s about “Why You Should Learn to Program“, by Chris Crawford, an Atari game developer at the time. Evidently he had spoken on the subject somewhere; afterwards, he put his notes essentially into article form; he then felt it necessary to flesh it out with additional material.

At first glance, though, this seems to clash with the message of Peter Norvig, who either works at or has worked at Google, in his article (which I also find authoritative and based on good research) ” Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years “. These two articles present somewhat contrasting views of the craft of programming; but I find them complementary.

Mr. Norvig’s view is the kind of view that I would expect of professional programmers. He believes that programming that not something that you can learn from a “Learn Language X in 21 Days” kind of approach. In fact, he even mused that 10,000 hours would possibly be a better view of the matter than ten years.

However, in giving his recipe for learning to program, his recipe, which obviously will involve hard work, mentions a very important first step: ”  Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.”

He obviously believes it should be fun. And so it should. Even if it comes relatively easily, it will almost certainly bring one a degree of frustration, if for no other reason than that you must, for any nontrivial task, explain what you want to the computer in excruciating detail.

Which brings us to Mr. Crawford’s thesis, consisting of three main ideas on why each of us should learn to program:

1. Recreation.

2. To learn the importance of clear communications.

3. “Learning to program will make you a better thinker.”

I leave you to read the article to get the details of his argument.

Where Mr. Crawford and Mr. Norvig differ are in the goals. Mr. Norvig’s recipe is for a master programmer, who could and would be paid well for mastering his craft- even if he still is doing it for fun. Spending 10,000 hours learning to program is serious stuff.

Mr. Crawford, in contrast, recognizes that there are professional programmers who will be paid well for their work; however, you don’t have to be good enough to write programs for money, to write programs. He gives the illustration of the man who takes pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and his family while on vacation. A professional photographer would likely take a technically “better” picture and put it on a postcard for the man to buy; but he prefers his picture, because he did it himself. A person need not be a master finish carpenter to enjoy doing his own woodwork. As Crawford says, programming is not nuclear physics; anyone can do it.

He recommended BASIC in his article; even he now backs away in this respect from his 1985 recommendation. The Wirthian languages (Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon) might be better choices. There are free Pascal compilers around; if a visual environment is more your speed, try Delphi; you may be able to find earlier versions for free. You can even try Visual Basic, if that suits you. Both BASIC and Pascal were originally designed as teaching languages; if programming interests you, try one of them. (Look for them; Google is your friend.)

The main thing is, the sooner you can get payback for your learning efforts, the better. For me, RPG allowed quick output, quick results at the start. That made up for the times of frustration that could and would come later.

I highly encourage you to read these articles, which give you a good perspective of the entire programming experience. Mr. Crawford, in particular, may just incite you to find out how pleasurable the ability to program can be.

My previous ruminations on my attempts to learn Oberon-2 has made me think about what motivates people to program, given the native intelligence to do so.

My cohort at my place of employment provides an interesting contrast to me. He has a lot of energy and a very active mind. He started out on computers as an operator in the ’70s running the IBM machine (a System/3, I believe) at the very place we are now. Interestingly,  I found at the same time he had bought a SOL microcomputer as a kit, which he then proceded to assemble. This was while he was yet a teenager. He then learned to program it. He went on to get engineering degrees, continuing to program in whatever programming language was necessary to run the machine he was working on- not necessarily a computer per se, even. He has tweaked a text editor to do some very sophisticated things.

Obviously, he gets a charge out of making the machine that he is working on work. He was doing it before I had ever seen a real computer in person, even though he’s younger than me. I think he is the sort of person who would program even if he wasn’t being paid to do it. The more complicated the task, the better; but he seems to be drawn more to seeing what the system can do more than to any particular mundane, normal business application.

On the other hand, for me computers are an annoyance; they sometimes get in the way of computing- that is, the solving of problems. I have no patience when a computer goes belly-up in the middle of something I’m trying to accomplish. I learned programming when I was 30, past the age of youthful exuberance and loaded with family responsibilities. I would have been in trouble if the programming language available as the way I could support my family had not been RPG, or perhaps COBOL or BASIC.

My orientation has never been on the technical side of things. A simple set of instructions for assembling a bookcase throws me for a loop. Once I was trying to install a set of windshield wipers. There were no words in the instructions, only a series of diagrams. It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to figure out the instructions. My expertise is in logic. I learned to read at an early age, and I can see patterns of ideas very quickly. I can see solutions to problems very quickly; but I have a very narrow focus; sometimes this results in my missing the “forest” (solution) because of looking too closely at the path between the “trees” (the details). I can be very original in finding solutions, as long as the goal is clearly defined, preferably by someone else. I do better building on other people’s ideas than originating my own.

So I get no pleasure from the gory details of computing. The C programming language annoys me because it seems like you jump through hoops to do what you want to do. “Print” becomes an exercise in control characters; in BASIC, “PRINT” is just that, print. And C has loose ends; I don’t like a language with loose ends. C is too close to the metal- or the silicon, if you will.

So I like a programming language with clarity. C may be clear to some people; it is not to me. The same goes for C++, Java, and any number of other languages you could name. I like order; perhaps that’s why I tend to gravitate toward the Wirthian languages- Pascal, Modula, Oberon. I want a language that will help protect me from mistakes by making at least the gross mistakes illegal. I feel uncomfortable with a language that allows you make a variable numeric at one point and alphanumeric at another point in the same program, as some scripting languages do. I am not adventurous in that respect.

So when it comes to screen displays, I prefer to have the system do the work. That is not a hard and fast rule; I once built an AS/400-style data entry screen using GWBASIC because I thought line-by-line BASIC data entry was so gauche. But in general I prefer to program and let the system take care of the screens.

But sometimes I wonder. I do also like system- level things, like writing my own program-file cross reference program. I would get geeked when my partner would suggest various functions for my program, like being able to click on a file name in a program source and actually look at the data in the file or the file’s descriptions or what fields are in the file. I wanted to make my AS/400 do some things his PC could do.

So different people are motivated by different things. My partner enjoys the process. I do too. Sometimes, I guess,  it’s better not to worry about “why” and just appreciate the pleasure.

I am still trying to push myself into actually learning to put the programming language Oberon-2 into practice in an actual project. And I’m still dancing around the periphery of my programming course.

Much of the early portion of the book “Oberon-2 Programming With Windows” concerns itself with actually setting up and getting acquainted with the programming environment. An interesting aspect of this environment is that it is not exactly like the environment Niklaus Wirth created when he created the Oberon language to enable the creation of the Oberon operating system back in the 1980s. The original Oberon system did not require that modules be linked explicitly to a program. They are somewhat independent entities. How this can be so is beyond the scope of this post; but in this implementation of Oberon for Windows named Pow!, one module has to be designated as the main module, which then can be explicitly linked to other modules.

The idea of modules being integrated into a whole is hardly unique to Oberon, of course. The idea of “top-down” design goes back at least to the 1970s, where it was felt that the best way to handle complicated tasks is by breaking them down into less complicated tasks, which could also be further broken down into simpler tasks of simple resolution.

For a general purpose language, this is truly an elegant concept.

Perhaps this is where we see the main difference between elegant block structured languages and the old business languages like Cobol and RPG. I will speak of RPG, since that is what I am most familiar with. RPG IV is what might be considered a “large” language. Everything you might ever want to do in business programming is part of RPG; and when you read discussions of how RPG might be improved, you will read suggestions of features that should be ADDED to the language. You will never hear talk of modules or “libraries” or even “service programs” being able to be referenced by the language. New features must be PART of the language; and if they are implemented, they simply make the language bigger and, in most cases, more complicated.

And so we see this world-view even in the structure of RPG programs. Usually, an RPG program does not consist of a few program or procedure calls in a relatively short mainline. It usually consists of a substantial mainline with occasional calls to subroutines or procedures. There is relatively little need or use of the top-down paradigm, or conceptual model. It is possible to do it in RPG, but the very layout of the language does not encourage it. For example, I recall being amused years ago by an RPG program that had only one one line in its detail calculations; it did all its work in a subroutine named DETAIL, which was called by the calculation   EXSR    DETAIL. The very phrase “service program”, used today to refer to a collection of often-used routines into one module, suggests a servant pressed into duty of a superior routine, rather than a coequal partner in the main processing. The name “subroutine” has the same connotation, even if the subroutines do the bulk of the processing. They are subordinate, called by the main “detail” routine.

As RPG is currently constituted, I would consider this the most effective way of using the language. For example, there is the concept that all file handling operations should be consigned to a service program, which would then handle accessing, inserting, deleting, and updating records in a given file. I know I’ve seen the concept recommended, though I can’t give specific  examples offhand. But when  file handling is so easy in RPG, why bother with a service program when you can do it directly?   ACCT#    CHAIN   MASTER.

So I’m up against a wall of habit and preconceived ideas as I continue to try to expand my horizons, and perhaps my effectiveness, by learning a language built on new concepts and that can be completely described (in the official report on the language) in 16 pages of normally spaced text. Just for comparison, the report for C++ is 740 pages in length. (I am already acquainted with BASIC.)  If I can’t learn Oberon, there’s not much point in trying others.

I work on code that, when I came to work for my client, was essentially RPGIII/RPG400 or older. Some of the code had been implemented way back in the 1970’s and was migrated forward as newer machines were installed. And the code showed it. (I have found interesting the large number of 80 and 96 byte files in some of the systems, remnants of old punchcard processing programs.) You haven’t lived until you’ve attempted to update a program that has grown over the years to be a 10000+ line, indicator-laden monster. If you’ve been away from the program awhile and you need to make a non-trivial change, you need to spend part of a day, at least, reviewing the program’s processing.

I am normally conservative about program changes. I generally do not rip apart code and rewrite it, especially if it is not broken. But if a program is to be revised, I do generally at least convert it to RPGIV before making even a minor change. As a phrase used by one of my favorite literary characters (Anne of Green Gables) says, doing this allows “more scope for imagination”.

I was making code changes for a conversion project I was working on when I came across a particular program I had seen before and shook my head at. But for some reason, this time something snapped. I just HAD to change a particular chunk of code, even though the code in fact worked. No errors. But how far to change it? I will explain what I did. In the end, what I do will likely be seen as good by some, too intrusive by others, and  not radical enough by still others.

(more…)

In a blog post on my son’s blog, I ruminated on helping young people to learn to program and what might be a good place to begin learning programming. At the end of the article, I suggested Oberon-2, a language created by Niklaus Wirth (creator of Pascal and Modula-2) and an associate. At the same time, I bemoaned the fact that I seemed to be unable to learn new languages, perhaps because of burnout or fatigue, perhaps lack of time, or even lack of a suitable project.

I have just about concluded that it is time to put up or shut up. I have a compiler, I have a book, and I have a project. It is time for me to go ahead and exercise some initiative and learn the language.

But perhaps you wonder why Oberon-2? Why not Java, which is also on the AS/400? I have commented on the steep learning curve. I have attempted Java tutorials; I have found them to be of a most forbidding nature. I don’t know if Java is supposed to be a “small” language or a “large” one; all I know is that one look at the documentation (see how long it takes you to scroll through the class list) makes me want to cringe. Of course, with any language, you usually use only subset of a language in your day-to-day programming; the problem here is finding what your subset consists of.

Why Oberon-2? It is object-oriented programming without the gobbledygook. A “method” is a procedure. A “class” is a record type. A variable of a record is an “object” or an “instance” of a “class”. A procedure call is essentially the same as “passing a message to an object”. I find the unquoted terms in the previous sentences more comprehensible than the corresponding terminology (in quotes) that has been perpetuated for the Java and C++ and Smalltalk environment. And it does not appear that it will take that long to learn how to write useful code; that is important for me.

So I propose to begin learning this language, and from time to time report on my progress. Knowing that at least a few people might be observing may also exert a certain social pressure to press on.

To pursue the topic I began in my previous post:

“Calculation syntax now looks more like the intuitive mathematical-function-like syntax found in most other modern programming languages. No doubt the Factor1-OpCode-Factor2-Result sequence has some magical storied history, but at this point it should be considered sand on a beach that’s been washed away by common sense and better practice. If I can write intuitive code in Java or C or Perl I should be able to do the same thing in RPG.”

2. Does it need to be like other modern programming languages?

I submit that it does not, and that those who are trying to make it so are making a grievous mistake.

From its inception, RPG was not a general purpose programming language. It was not designed to calculate formulas or functions. It was not designed to create new operating systems, like C was. Syntax like F1 ADD F2 FLD3 and MOVEL STRG1 STRG2 was not designed to impress a compiler writer. Pure and simple, RPG was designed to push data around. It was designed to read data files, manipulate them, do a few calculations on them and spit them out on a report, another file, or (later) a screen. To do this, it has many powerful op codes, in a few cases operations you don’t see specified in other languages. Operations like XFOOT, used to sum all the values in an array and store the result in a variable. Even MOVE and MOVEL, operations which to this point they have not chosen to implement in freeform RPG. MOVEL moves data and, in some cases, will even do a conversion from alphanumeric to numeric.

Also, RPG was intended to be terse; in the mind of programmers today, even too terse.

Consider this calculation, one line of RPG:

C  10 11 12TOT          COMP      50               202530

Here is the pseudocode equivalent:

IF   (*IN10 and *IN11 and *IN12)
    EVAL   *IN20=*OFF
    EVAL    *IN25=*OFF
    EVAL   *IN30=*OFF
    IF     TOT>50
        EVAL *IN20 = *ON
    ELSEIF TOT<50
       EVAL *IN25= *ON
    ELSEIF TOT=50
      EVAL  *IN30=*ON
   ENDIF
ENDIF

A lot of instructions packed into one line.

Put simply, RPG is a business programming language, like its cousin COBOL. Its intended purpose is to handle business data. Business people can write it without much trouble, if they choose to learn. Computer operators learned it without formal training, on their own. You did not have to know computer science. The syntax was rigid, fixed in format. Just fill in the blanks. Describe the input, insert data manipulation calculations, and lay out the output. It may be contrasted with Pascal, which Niklaus Wirth designed with not much emphasis on input and output. With RPG, you lay out with just a few specifications what the printer does on page overflow, define skipping and spacing, put your data in a precise place on the print line, and format numbers, if necessary, with edit codes or edit words. With programs in other, general-purpose programming languages, you have to jump through hoops to get precise formatting. With RPG, you know how many spaces a field will take up on a screen or printout. Many general-purpose languages are not nearly so precise.

Some languages have an INTEGER data type; how much space it takes up may vary even with the compiler. In RPG, you define the integer as 10 bytes long, with 0 bytes to the right of the decimal point. RPG never cared (until relatively recently, when adding floating-point handling), whether a number was an INTEGER or a REAL; it was just a number. The number 10 was the same as 10.000000; it might have to do some fancy manipulation under the covers to add 10 and 10.000000, but the programmer doesn’t have to care what kind of numbers they are; he just adds them.

(By the way, in this blog I use “he” to designate both male and female; there is no good pronoun to designate both sexes with the same word in English. He/she or She/he is clumsy, and alternating the use of “he” and “she” is just silly. Anyone who can’t figure out that using “he” means both men and women here, based on longtime English usage, probably isn’t smart enough to be reading this blog anyway.)

When they take RPG from its roots, it becomes an attempt to transform it into a clone of another language- something that is not needed and in fact makes the language more clumsy and bloated with often no gain in function. Take, for example, the XFOOT operation above; and take total=%xfoot(arrayname) - please. All it accomplishes is to make it pretty for the general-purpose programmer who the compiler writer is trying to persuade to give RPG a try. I don’t think you would want to hire a programmer in any language who would find XFOOT ARRAYNAME TOTAL difficult to understand. I don’t see anybody trying to reformat COBOL to appeal to the exalted programmer of Java.

COBOL has evolved over the years to become the pre-eminent business programming language, with even object orientation embodied in the latest COBOL standard. And yes, there is still new code being created in COBOL. One thing I found interesting is that they have managed to update COBOL without feeling under compulsion to make it look like Java. COBOL has a COMPUTE statement, just like RPG has an EVAL opcode; but no attempt has been made to create COBOL functions, to my knowledge. Why not? It’s not needed to perform business-type calculations; and I can’t see how it would avoid looking ugly. Evidently those in charge of the standard for COBOL recognize that, after all, you don’t write compilers in COBOL. If only the designers of RPG would respond in like fashion.

I came across a discussion of freeform RPG and why the author felt it is the way to go rather than the fixed format , old-style. I would like to analyze it in some depth, not to make fun of the author, but rather because his views are representative of those who think the way he does, and they are stated very concisely. (This may take several posts, so bear with me.)

What is his reason number 4 for using RPG freeform?

“Calculation syntax now looks more like the intuitive mathematical-function-like syntax found in most other modern programming languages. No doubt the Factor1-OpCode-Factor2-Result sequence has some magical storied history, but at this point it should be considered sand on a beach that’s been washed away by common sense and better practice. If I can write intuitive code in Java or C or Perl I should be able to do the same thing in RPG.”

We will ignore the condescending reference to magical storied history and sand on the beach for the moment. and concentrate on other things first.

1. Is freeform, whether in RPG or other languages, INTUITIVE?

Well, what is “intuitive”? According to the Webster’s On line Dictionary:”1 a: known or perceived by intuition : directly apprehended <had an intuitive awareness of his sister’s feelings> b: knowable by intuition <intuitive truths> c: based on or agreeing with intuition <intuitive responses> <makes intuitive sense> d: readily learned or understood <software with an intuitive interface> .

And what is intuition? “1: quick and ready insight 2 a: immediate apprehension or cognition b: knowledge or conviction gained by intuition c: the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

The most obvious applicable meaning is “readily learned and understood”. Certainly some of the languages he mentioned might be intuitive for some; but I thought RPG was readily learned; I learned it in just a few informal sessions by reading a textbook when I didn’t know a physical computer from a dustbin and had no concept of computer science and had never seen a computer language. I would be interested in seeing how many people learned C or Perl – or especially Java- by just being given a computer book for the first time and told, “read this”.

About 20 years ago, I bought a C compiler for my microcomputer and a C textbook. I wanted to see what it was all about, and I was willing to spend money to do so. But I got into it and started seeing things like int main(), all the different data types, and { and } and a= (b= (c=25)) and if (age ==40) – just for starters- I looked down from my RPG II heights and said “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

That last reference is especially intriguing. Nicklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon-2, wrote an interesting article about good and bad ideas in computer science. Here’s what he said on that subject:

“A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957 and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let “=” denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x. Algol corrected this mistake by the simple solution: Let assignment be denoted by “:=”.

“Perhaps this may appear as nitpicking to programmers who got used to the equal sign meaning assignment. But mixing up assignment and comparison is a truly bad idea, because it requires that another symbol be used for what traditionally was expressed by the equal sign. Comparison for equality became denoted by the two characters “==” (first in C). This is a consequence of the ugly kind, and it gave rise to similar bad ideas using “++”, “–“, “&&” etc. ”

So C came up with the bad idea c== 5; when you first come to it, being acquainted only with “=”, you look at “==” and your first thought is, “What on earth is that?” I place in that same category an expression like x+=1. You don’t know C; you know what a “+” is; you know what an “=” is; but what is a “+=”? I’m sorry folks, but that is not intuitive.

You think such stuff is intuitive not because it is truly intuitive; you think it because you have been raised to expect data in the format x=Y+3 in your “Introduction to Programming” or “Introduction to Computer Science” courses. You may have seen something like it in BASIC, and it fits the pattern. I was raised on X ADD 1 Y. I think THAT is intuitive.

Am I wrong? Is not X ADD 1 Y practically the same structure as 1 + 1 = 2, the mathematical structure you learned in first grade, a long time before your Computer Science courses? And, even if you allow the “bad idea” to be used, is not ADD 1 X easier to comprehend than X+=1? Which is REALLY more intuitive?

So the block-structured languages mentioned are not innately “intuitive”; whether they are more intuitive than fixed-format RPG depends entirely on where you are coming from. And whichever direction you come from, can you really say with a straight face that X+=1 would be more readily comprehensible than ADD 1 X for a new programmer?