RPG

Revision as of 01:46, 3 December 2012

In the area of programming languages, RPG doesn't have anything to do with role-playing games, but is rather a language introduced by IBM in the 1950s, geared toward punch cards. Its name stands for Report Program Generator.

RPG is designed for batch-processing tasks that churn through all records of a database (such as a list of transactions) and perform some operation on them such as adding them up or outputting them in a report. An unusual quirk of its syntax is that the function of elements of each program line depends on the column number where the element is located within the line.