• Greg (unregistered)

    I'm assuming RPG neither stands for Role Playing Game nor for Rocket Propelled Grenade?

  • (nodebb)

    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.

  • Rob (unregistered) in reply to Greg

    I had to look it up, so the following link in the article would have been useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

  • (nodebb) in reply to Greg

    My first thought was, "What do roleplaying games have to do with this weird ancient-looking syntax?"

  • (nodebb) in reply to Greg

    I'm assuming RPG neither stands for Role Playing Game nor for Rocket Propelled Grenade?

    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:

    The term "rocket-propelled grenade" is a backronym from the Russian acronym РПГ (ручной противотанковый гранатомёт, tr. ruchnoy protivotankovy granatomyot), meaning 'hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher', the name given to early Soviet designs

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade
  • (nodebb)

    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.

  • DQ (unregistered)

    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

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    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.

  • Jaloopa (unregistered)

    or so quoth the Unreliable Source

    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

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