One of the basic principles of programming is that coding conventions (guidelines and standards) improve the readability of source code and make software maintenance easier. Coding conventions provide the foundation for developing applications that are easy to maintain and modify. This article and an article to follow are a style guide to coding RPG programs using free-form RPG in an ILE environment.

When developing guidelines and standards, one of the major challenges is to determine what is a standard and what is a guideline. For example, code indentation would be a standard, but whether the code is indented by two,

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

Juliet wondered, “What’s in a name?” Ted wondered, “What’s in a save file?” The Display Save File (DSPSAVF) command would show me only so much, so I wrote a utility to give me more information. Maybe it will be helpful to you.

It’s common for me to exchange save files with other IBM i professionals. One problem I often run into is that someone (who might be me) cannot restore a save file to their system because the save file was created for a more recent release of

I love it when IBM gives me a way for me to do something I couldn’t do before. When I think of the tools I had to work with three decades ago, I could almost weep. Recently I had to search a source member for a string of characters, and I was overjoyed that LPEX gave me what SEU couldn’t.

To set the stage for my requirement, I should mention that as a matter of practice, I qualify data structures in my RPG programs. For me to omit the qualified keyword, I have to have a reason.

dcl-ds  Status       qualified;