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Admin
I'm assuming RPG neither stands for Role Playing Game nor for Rocket Propelled Grenade?
Edit Admin
It's Report Program Generator. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
It was one of the very early attempts at "easy" report generation. Essentially the app contained an engine that knew how to do multi level reports and you just had to describe tur data layout, report layout, totalling requirements, etc. But this was all in the era of punch cards and sequential files (card, tape, or newfangled disk) as "databases".
To say the old syntax was idiosyncratic is a huge understatement.
Addendum 2025-12-08 07:21: Every geezer in the audience has memories of it. You either did a bit of it, or knew people who had & still bore the scars.
Addendum 2025-12-08 07:22: It really was a bit of a mindf**k.
Admin
I had to look it up, so the following link in the article would have been useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
Edit Admin
My first thought was, "What do roleplaying games have to do with this weird ancient-looking syntax?"
Edit Admin
Indeed, as noted, although "rocket-propelled grenade" (with the hyphen) is an English-language backronym (less contrived than most, by convenient coincidence) from the romanisation of a Russian-language term, or so quoth the Unreliable Source:
Edit Admin
I worked at a Fortune 50 company until 2013, they were still writing new RPG code when I left. They converted to RPG Free some time while I was there, probably around 2010.
One of my favorite "features" was that columns were treated as local variables, so if you needed to access the columns from two tables, all the column names had to be globally unique. This combined with an eight character column name limit (I don't know the reason or if that was a local WTF), led them to have every table use a two character prefix for all of its columns, leaving six characters for the actual column name.
Admin
We still write new RPG code and programs every day. Our entire company runs on it. And because a lot of the code dates from the late eighties and nineties it is a mix of RPG III, IV , free and full free. New code is still written in all these formats, depending on who is coding and what style is used in the program you modify. And column names are suffixed with a two character code to make the names unique across the database
Admin
Back when I was a teenager, I was trying to teach myself game development in C++. I was a big fan of the Final Fantasy series, and so I wanted to make a Role-Playing Game.
I was googling around (or perhaps I was Yahoo!'ing around?) for websites on "RPG programming", and I was very confused when I found all these books about the RPG programming language. Fortunately, I managed to avoid accidentally buying any of those books.
Admin
This seems like a bad name for Wikipedia since the stochastic goldfish that are ChatGPT and its peers have become the go-to unreliable sources for millions of people worldwide
Edit Admin
I was introduced to RPG in the 1980s. I learned a little bit, but all the "programming" I ever did in RPG was mostly cosmetic, making columns wider when the numbers got bigger or adding a column that was the sum or the difference of two or three columns.
I always regarded RPG as a poor man's COBOL in the way that MINIX's employs a poor man's fstab.
Edit Admin
You're not wrong about LLM generative "AI" doodads, but Wikipedia remains the original informatic fount of large-scale(1) unreliability, and I've called it "the Unreliable Source" almost since the beginning, long before ChatGPT and its foul kin got started.
(1) Yes, I know, almost anything to do with informatics might be considered a fount of unreliability, but Wikipedia has that extra thing of being "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", with the additional proviso that I add, "and frequently does".
Edit Admin
Wow thanks, never heard about that one before :-O
Admin
I'm a geezer who should know better (professional programmer since '78) but I have the heart of a 13 year old boy.* For me, RPG = Role Playing Game.
Crazy aside: Did anyone but me notice that the source-code in "The Martian" was Lisp?
Edit Admin
Sometimes I feel really lucky that I dodged a bullet there. I managed to never got stuck on ol' IBM classic host "stuff" and could always play with the newer toys :-).
Edit Admin
To be fair, it IS easy compared to the brain-twisting mess of programming accounting machines. See Bitsavers for a taste!
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/punchedCard/AccountingMachine/224-1614-13_402-403-419.pdf
Page 6 has a picture of a control panel. To make a report, you place physical wires from one socket to the next. And yes, version control was a mess.
Edit Admin
I worked for a trucking company in 1985 that had a computer that ran RPG II. I looked at books on how to program it, but ran out of weed and gave up.
"This combined with an eight character column name limit (I don't know the reason..." Everything (IDs, passwords, filenames) had an eight character limit. I don't know the reason, but Octal may be related.
Admin
I'm the OP. I forgot I'd even sent this in; it's been a year or more since I last worked on that program.
We use The IBM Midrange Formerly Known as AS/400. IBM does keep adding features to ILE RPG, believe it or not. (ILE = Integrated Language Environment)
The code was written in 2004.
Stephen's idea of converting RPG IV fixed-format to free-format, when I insisted on it, was to manually remove the C (for "calculation") from the beginning of the line and stick a semicolon on the end of the line, without changing the spacing or indentation.