

Ask HN: RPG(/400) remake viable? - Doug12

Hey everyone. I recently started working for a company that uses RPG with their customers. Me and the language have a love hate relationship. I could only use it at my workplace, and not at home on my Windows machine.<p>I was wondering if I should take my spare time to make a Windows version of the language, just for fun.<p>I&#x27;d love some input on this, lets talk. :)
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wglb
RPG as in RPG III as on system 32/34/AS400?

Regarding the love/hate part, I must admit that I don't have the love part.

I spent about a year programming a system 34 for my first ever consulting
client. In previous gigs, I spoke loudly and often against COBOL, but when
they installed COBOL on that set of machines, I was ecstatic.

I wish you well in your endeavor, but this is one I will not join. It would
not be pretty.

But follow your bliss, and good luck.

~~~
Doug12
Yes, AS400 to be precise.

I shall delve into it, not sure how it will turn out though myself. :)

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coreb
It's not a viable product people would pay for, but I think it would be
interesting as an education/academic language. There is a niche I would like
to see filled for a language with data storage built-into it, but at a lower
level than your SQL database's query planner. WINRPG is too expensive for a
hobbiest.

I appreciate what I learned from RPG-IV (never had to deal with "the cycle")
and the "i" environment. If upcoming programmers had to learn to deal with
their data using only loops, READ, and CHAIN commands, we'd see much better
designed and optimized databases. This could fill a missing link in some CS
education between building a file based index and designing a database in a
RDBMS.

I gave thought to starting something similar. My starting point would have
been trying to hook into the Sqlite Virtual Databse Engine
([http://www.sqlite.org/vdbe.html](http://www.sqlite.org/vdbe.html)) or the
Postgres equivalent since those seemed the closest open source equivalents to
an RPG program running on LUW systems.

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JoachimSchipper
It seems that this already exists:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Platforms](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Platforms).
The company may or may not be dead; consider sending them an e-mail.

(Of course, you're free to reimplement "for fun"; just thought you might be
interested in a faster path to working? software.)

~~~
Doug12
I need to find a download for that compiler though.

