Case sensitive RPG

The CAAC has reviewed this IBM Idea and recommends that IBM not implement this request. Each company has their own coding standards. By forcing the compiler to flag the case, it would potentially break the company standards. This seems to be purely aesthetic, and does not bring value to the IBM i Community.

Background: The COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CAAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual IBM Ideas on the broader IBM i community, and has therefore reviewed your Idea.

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Nancy Uthke-Schmucki - CAAC Program Manager

IBM will use this request as input to planning but no commitment is made or implied. This request will be updated in the future if IBM implements it. IBM will use votes and comments from others in the community to help prioritize this request.

About whether this would be a solution for RFE 99792, it's related for sure. But the compiler would still have to make the change requested by 99792 to strip the quotes from the alternate names. If the alternate name is "CustomerAddress", and the short name is CUSTADR, the compiler would currently use the name CUSTADR since it ignores alternate names with quotes. It wouldn't recognize the name CustomerAddress as referring to the CUSTADR field or subfield.

I'm not sure what is meant by having the compiler automatically fixing the case. The compiler would never change the source code. And it wouldn't correct the case of the name in the compile listing.

For names defined in the same source file, or names defined in copy files where the definition was mixed case, I think the case on the definition would be the official case. For names defined by externally described files and data structures, using the case of the first use, as RDi does, seems like a good option. And maybe the same would apply to names defined in copy files in all uppercase, although some programming standards might say to use say all uppercase for named constants. For copy files, there could be a directive saying to respect the case of anything defined in the copy file.

If this feature was implemented in the compiler, I think there would have to be two levels: enforce and warn.

For me, one of the best things about this would be that the error messages and cross reference would use the mixed-case version of the name. I especially dislike the way the cross reference is all upper case. It's sometimes really hard to read long names.

I guess there could be a third option, just to maintain the first-use mixed-case version of the name in the dictionary, without any checking for differences.

This might also be a solution for RFE 97792

This would be of enormous benefit to “young” people coming to the platform from other languages, where case sensitive is standard.
One of the considerations is externally defined files/data structures, where the field names are all upper case. Perhaps the RPG compiler could treat these fields the same way the outline view in RDi treats them - the first use of the variable name becomes the case version.
Another nice to have (perhaps a separate RFE) would be if the LPEX editor could auto-correct the casing of a variable name, to ensure compliance. I would sooner have this as opposed to having the compiler alter the code.

A great Idea. But instead of warning, it should automatically fix the case. Since it knows that the variable was declared, it should fix according to the declaration. Also add a compiler option to just fix the case and not to compile yet.