In Printing from Qshell, Ted Holt lamented that there seems to be no useful way to treat parameter lists in RPG programs and procedures as arrays, as the C language does. This need arises for me every once in a while, and while I’ve never found a completely satisfactory way to handle it, I have found a way that works.

First, it might be good to provide an example in C, for those who do not know that language, in order to illustrate the advantage of treating parameters as an array. The following C program prints out the parameters

Are you tired of seeing commas (or whatever thousands separator you use) in dates when querying data with SQL? Are your users underwhelmed when you give them a quick-and-dirty report that has dates like 20,060,301 and 20,051,124 on it? Do you wish SQL had some way you could easily reformat a date to get rid of commas and maybe even insert some more traditional separator characters?

The only SQL implementations I know of that allow you to format or edit a number are Sequel, from Advanced Systems Concepts, and Microsoft Access. If you’re using most any other version of

In my last column, I presented the first half of a template for moving libraries between i5/OS partitions, covering how to prepare data for movement and detailed steps for saving a library to a save file. This week, I conclude the plan, showing you how to complete the transfer through FTP, restoring your library to the target system, and checking the results.

To review, my plan for moving libraries between systems contained the following five steps:

1. Prepping the data to be moved
2. Saving the library to be moved
3. Transferring the saved library to the new partition or machine
4. Restoring the