Brother Cozzi's "Top Ten RPG IV Requirements"

Recently Brother Bob Cozzi, the eminent leader of the RPGers Order,  published a list he called the Top Ten RPG IV Requirements. I would like to respond to that list and proffer some of my own:

1. %JOBLOG(): While I have the greatest respect for Brother Cozzi this requirement leaves me feeling,... feh. Our lord Ib'm saw fit to provide us with the QMHSNDPM API and I've been using it so long I know the parameters by heart.
2. %CONCAT(): I can see this being kind of useful, kind of like the sprintf() function from the "C" run-time cannon, but there is a difficulty when it comes to numeric fields. What if you want some to keep the leading zeros. It seems to me that it would be easier to just string everything together in a character expression.
3. %GETENV and %PUTENV: Great idea. Don't know why our Lord Ib'm hasn't implemented these built-ins yet. They would be very useful. What's the difference between this and using the Unix "getenv" and "putenv" functions to do the same thing? [Thanks to Father Klement for reminding me about these two functions as I had completely forgotten about them.]
   
4. %STDOUT: What's the difference between this and using the Unix "open" with the "read" and "write" functions to do the same thing? Am I missing something? (And by the way, what's wrong with switching to embedded SQL? I've been doing it now for a number of years and I love the fact that if you add a field to a record format you don't have to recompile everything.)
5. %REGEX: Can't really comment 'cause I haven't used the APIs yet.
6. %TOLOWER and %TOUPPER: This already exists and it's really easy. Two named constants and the %XLATE() built-in and you're done. I can't imagine our Lord Ib'm wasting his time on this.
7. Native Support for UTF8 (ASCII): This is a good one. I'd love to have a CCSID keyword to identify the data in the field and the internal support to convert the data as it's being moved into or out of the field.
8. 3rd-party Add-On Library Support: Great for developers, but I suspect that the vast majority of AS/400 programmers like myself won't care too much.
9. Reclamation; of columns 1 to 7 in free format syntax: I don't mind the /free and /end-free requirement or the loss of columns 1 to 7 as I too use it to mark changed code. What has always bugged me is the requirement that the executable code ends at column 80. It's a 100 byte line and we should be able to use its full length if we want to. In free-format languages one isn't restricted to the end point of the file, so why should free-format RPG be that way too.
10. Port RPG IV to Windows 7 and Mac OS X and Linux: Great idea as it will expose the followers of those false religions to the beauty of iSeries worship.

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My top ten: 

1. Free format everything in RPG including the "D" and "F" specs and remove the end-of-line restriction at column 80.
2. %LEN and %DECPOS should be compile-time BIFs when the parameter is a single field. (When the parameter is an expression they can revert to being run-time BIFs.) I've got some routines where there are more named constants specifying %LEN and %DECPOS than local variables.
3. Null Terminated Fields: I'd go further on item number 7 in Brother Cozzi's list by asking for an additional keyword that identifies a character field as null terminated. Every time you use it or change it the compiler would automatically handle the null terminator. 
4. Expand *JOBRUN date formats: Currently restricted to *MDY, *DMY, *YMD, and *JUL. They should be expanded to *EUR, *USA, *ISO, *JIS, *LONGJUL, etc., which would also require the O/S folks in Rochester add these values to the DATFMT attribute of the job. I can't tell you how many times I've had to write code to get around this restriction in full date processing in an international environment. 
5. Expand date functionality to include date formats required by such things as email headers, RSS, *DTS (internal date format for message fields), etc. The learning curve on the MI instructions and/or Unix API's for them all was daunting.
6. Fix Data Display Problems in Debug: In debug, displaying the data at the end of a passed pointer has always had problems. I've got code all over the place where a structure pointer has been passed and it points to a space that contain pointers to other structures and the debug facilities in WDSCi and the green screen can't display the data they point to because of the underlying design of debugging data stored in the program object.
7. Multi-dimensional arrays: Every other language I've ever worked with has had the facility for arrays with more than one index. How is it that RPG has survived all of these years with one index?
8. Dynamic arrays: Many of us have written service programs that allow an RPG program to expand the size of an array on request and I think it's time that the RPG compiler got this feature. Instead of being a fixed size stored in the program it would be an allocated heap space. If I was designing this feature I'd add a new parameter to the DIM keyword that allows *EXPAND or *FIXED along with the dimension that would constitute the space allocated initially. Whenever a program specified an index that was out of bounds the run-time functions would simply re-allocate the space.
9. Parameter signatures in RPG procedures (aka Procedure Overloading): This would be similar to what is currently available in O-O languages like Java and C++. We can do this with SQL UDFs, so why not with RPG procedures? This would also make it a lot easier to interface with C++ procedures. It would also be nice to not have to use *OMIT and *NOPASS if you didn't want to. 
10. RPG classes: Another facet of Java and C++ that would be useful. It would also make it easier to interface with Java and C++ objects because the JNI hoops one must jump through now are too daunting to be useful.

Lord Ib'm hear my prayer, please have your minions fix the problem with READE that locks the last record in a STRCMTCTL LCKLVL(*ALL) environment. (This is the record that hasn't been read in because it's the one that caused the end-of-file condition.) This has been a permanent restriction since the System/38 days because the O/S routines that RPG is using are the ones that are locking the record. Toronto and Rochester should finally put their heads together on this one and find a solution.