Lattice RPG II

An RPG development system for DOS, primarily created to allow those with IBM System/34 or System/36 to port their RPG II applications to a PC running DOS. But since it had a high compatibility with S/36 RPG II and no run-time royalties it was also used as a cheaper alternative to developing on a native system. Compatibility with System/38 and Wang VS was later added to the system but not for Unisys RPG II or System/3, although porting S/3 code to the system was not difficult since the S/36 based environment it emulated was primarily as superset.

During the mid/late 90s the system was also marketed by Lattice as a cheaper alternative to an AS/400 as it allowed S/36 owners to extend their systems with cheap networked PCs that ran the same code and had an the same user interface as the S/36. The Lattice system also allowed program data areas larger than 64K so it could actually run larger programs than S/36 and considerably faster in some instances on fast hardware.

Features
The system came with the OCL environment that emulated the look and feel of System/36 and could be used to develop in or as a target if you wanted Lattice RPG II was mostly used in the OCL environment but it also has facilities to create code for a normal DOS environment.

Source Entry Utility (SEU) is a full-screen editor that again emulated the editor on a System/36 but has some features missing in that environment like syntax checking that is aware of the different syntaxes for System 34, 36, 38, Wang VS, the Lattice system itself and the ability to create custom syntax files. Can open multiple files at once each with its own syntax format and it has an information/status display at the bottom of the screen.

SDA is a screen painter that can create forms for S/36 or DOS.

PC specific features that were over and above those available on a S/36 included:
 * Network Support - Including file locking and trap lock conditions.
 * dBASE Support - The program can create and work with dBASE database files and RPG II can be used to generate reports from dBASE files.
 * Alternate Index Files - More flexible, allows indexing of non-contiguous keys.
 * EBCDIC or ASCII Support - Can work with both EBCDIC and ASCII data.
 * Full-procedure File Support - Lets you process data files in full-procedural mode to consolidate file operations.
 * External Subroutine Support - Allows you to call functions created in other DOS development systems.
 * User Defined Keymapping - Lets you reconfigure the PCs keyboard to suit your preference.
 * Help Screen Support - Allows you to specify operator help screens for display formats.
 * Colour Support - SDA can paint colour screens.
 * Special Language Extensions - To take advantage of the PC environment.
 * Support for up to 10 character labels in factor 1 and factor 2 of calculation specs.
 * Hexadecimal constant format allows you to place special characters, foreign characters and PC graphic codes in your display fields.
 * First subroutine support forces detail calculations before the first page (1P) of output to create variable titles in headings.

Version

 * Lattice RPG II v4.00 (Last known version)
 * Adds compatibility with System/36 RPG II, Release 6.0. Including CALL/PARM and VTOC (volume table of contents).


 * Lattice RPG II v3.10 (1990)
 * Lattice RPG II v2.20

Related software

 * Lattice CodePRobe - RPG debugger
 * Lattice dBC III - Same dBase engine as used in this product
 * Lattice DFE/DFU - RPG file utilities
 * Lattice RPG 400D - AS/400 compatible RPG system for DOS
 * Lattice RPG 400W - AS/400 compatible RPG system for Windows

Licence and availability
Discontinued commercial software

Publisher

 * Lattice