Report Program Generator Programming

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RPG, an acronym for Report Program Generator is a programming language for IBM AS/400 and iSeries and non-IBM platforms, such as Personal Computing, although most RPG is done in the IBM midrange world. In the business world for many decades, most software was written in either some version of RPG or COBOL, which is an acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language.

Most versions of RPG are not free flow. Where characters are sideways on source code lines are extremely critical. RPG is powerful when it comes to data base manipulation, and processing masses of transactions. It is not as powerful as other languages with high level mathematics. It is not well suited to e-commerce. Typically web-based transactions are done in a language such as Java which communicate with RPG to handle the back end business functions.

There are many versions of RPG. RPG/400 is at about RPG III and a half, predating ILE, where many different programming languages can be intertwined in one program. For example, an RPG IV program can call a module written in C or CL or UIM or many other languages, so as to use the best language for the particular function. RPG/400 can also have embedded within it, the execution of SQL/400.

The latest version is RPG IV and it supports free formatting.