Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Too often we humans give little thought to what we do or why we do it, even though taking an organized approach to an activity has its advantages. In this article, I present one approach to the handling of parameters in programs and tell why I consider this a good way to process parameters.

Parameters are data that are supplied to a program in order to affect the way it behaves. For example, the ability to supply file names, member names, and various options to the Copy File

I did not take your suggestion to write a subprocedure and embed it in a service program. It seemed like too much trouble to me. I wrote a program instead. It does the trick and it’s a lot less complicated than all those hoops you told me to jump through. I guess ILE isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

–Chuck

Chuck presented me with a problem. I suggested he write a subprocedure to solve it. He didn’t like the idea of creating a module, writing binder language, creating a service program from the module, adding the service program to

As of this writing, my staff and I are preparing to upgrade the first of three System i 550 partitions from i5/OS V5R4 to i 6.1 on April 14. In an earlier article, I discussed getting started with a 6.1 upgrade. As a case study, this issue I’ll go over the planning process for actually performing the upgrade by reviewing my planning process for an actual IBM i partition.

Completing The Pre-Upgrade Tasks

At this point, we’ve completed most of the heavy lifting needed to perform the upgrade. With our Applications group, we’ve gone through and corrected all system