Editing the New TR7 Free Format RPG

Just a short blog this week as we know that all you really have time for right now is thoughts of turkey and Black Friday sales. Or at least that is true for our American readers. Our Canadian readers  already had Thanksgiving back in October (which, as usual, we missed because we were running the RPG & DB2 Summit at the time). Canadians still get Black Friday sales courtesy of Canadian retailers who are convinced we'll all do our Christmas shopping in the U.S. if they don't offer sales. They may be right!

The real point of today's post, however, is to give you a heads up on the upcoming support in RDi for the new free-form capabilities added to RPG in V7.1's TR 7. The more we use TR7's free-form coding style the more we like it. Jon has even started coding F specs again as opposed to cloning them! But it is not as easy to use as it should be when your editor insists that everything you key is an error! Of course, for SEU users it will go on being an error since SEU is not being updated.

Unfortunately the update to RDi was not available with TR7, but we were fortunate to have the opportunity to beta test the new support and we must admit we're impressed. Not only is the new RPG syntax fully supported, but the content assist feature (initiated by Control + Space) is even better than normal and will be a huge help to those trying to learn the new syntax. In essence what happens is that if you press Ctrl/Space after coding (say) Dcl-F to declare a file you will be told that a file name is needed, type a name and the assist will list the device types available, and so on. Perhaps even more importantly, we have found that this prompting works well even on existing lines and by simply moving the cursor along a line you can see the definitions for all of the keywords appear. Very useful.

We won't go into any more detail as we are aware that this is a beta version and so not everything is currently working fully, but it is promising and we're looking forward to getting our hands on the real thing when IBM releases it-whenever that is.