Those of us who have adopted subprocedures as a way of life often use their ability to return a result without thinking too much about the possible implications. But no technology should be thrown blindly into production without some understanding of the underlying tradeoffs.

Ted Holt has previously written tips on the performance aspects of parameter passing (Parameter Passing and Performance) and on the basics of subprocedure performance (Performance of Function Subprocedures). In this article, I want to take that discussion one step further because I find that many people still fail to appreciate the potential

I find Qshell a powerful tool for manipulating IFS files, but some Qshell features make me long for my MS DOS batch file programming days. A case in point is the ability to rename files in mass. Let me show you what I mean.

I want to rename the files with a .txt extension so that they have a .csv extension instead. I only want to rename .txt files, and I only want to rename the files in a certain directory. In MS DOS, I would have used a rename command with wildcards in both arguments.

ren *.txt *.csv

Try

In my shop, some people cannot use PC5250’s run the same function. After selecting run the same, a new PC5250 window appears and it looks like the new session is trying to start. Several messages appear in the status bar, the new session stops trying to connect, the 5250 screen goes blank, and the status bar message reads “Disconnected.” What’s up with that?

–Any number of users

This is an amalgamated question that I occasionally get from a reader, which tells me it’s a fairly common problem. When configured correctly, PC5250’s run the same function allows you to start