OT: AS/400 and RPG

[Bruce R. Montague]

About RPG, there do not seem to be a lot of current
programming books, but I have noticed and thumbed-through
some recent RPG titles at some of the silicon valley
tech-bookstores (Digital Guru, I guess, and MicroCenter;
Computer Literacy is no longer with us, alas). Some
group at IBM seems to be keeping RPG up to date, it
appears perhaps it is still considered a primary
language on the AS/400, perhaps due to the large
body of legacy apps. I guess they're calling it
RPG/400?

>From my casual perusal, it appears to have taken on
ever more of a "database query language" flavor with
respect to the integrated AS/400 database; it is
sometimes easy when dealing with even trivial programs
that are front-ending a database to find porting
more difficult then expected due to functionality
that has been offloaded to the database. I'm not
sure what the "forms support" situation is, but
it might also be something where there's a lot
of functionality "under the hood" that might have
to be re-implemented.

Warning - it's been a quarter century since I used
RPG! There is some good to be found in most any
system or language, I do believe I once maintained 
an RPG "app" on a System/3 with only 8K of memory.


 - bruce