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Status Future consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Languages - RPG
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 15, 2024

**free to be an optional default on compile commands

We have some applications that are fully free form. In these cases we don’t want to have to enter **free at the top of every piece of code as it seems unnecessary, but we have to do it anyway.

If the compiler commands had an option something like FREEDFT( *NO | *YES ) then we could use the *YES option in one place to tell the compiler that all code is free by default and then not need the **free declaration at the top of every piece of code.

In case **free was encountered when using FREEDFT(*YES) it could be ignored.

CRTBNDRPG, CRTRPGMOD, CRTSQLRPGI

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Jun 10, 2024
    IBM will use this Idea as input to planning, but no commitment is made or implied. This Idea 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 Idea.

    However, it is not possible to support FREEDFT(*YES) to change the default for all the source members in the compile. All included source would have to be fully-free-form since there is no syntax to indicate that the code is column-limited.

    Also, tooling such as RDi and Visual Studio Code for IBM i needs to see **FREE to know that the code is fully-free-form.

    If this Idea is implemented, it is more likely that new source member types would be added to indicate that the code is fully-free-form. Then a new compile parameter such as FREE(*SRCMBRTYPE) would be added to indicate to the compiler that the source member type should be used to determine whether the code is fully-free-form.

    -IBM Power Systems Development