Welcome to PowerCL: eXtreme CL (XCL)

Are you looking to improve your productivity when developing Control Language (CL) programs? Then eXtreme CL is just what you're looking for.

eXtreme CL is a rich set of commands that complement and enhance the CL commands provided by the i operating system. With XCL you now have at your fingertips capabilities that would previously have required substantial development and testing effort in CL; developing and calling a program written in languages such as RPG, COBOL, or C; or deciding not to provide a given function to your users.

Some XCL commands initially appear to provide functions that you find in other high level languages such as RPG. The Find and Replace String (FNDRPLSXCL) command for instance can find all occurrences of a character string such as 'ABC' within a CL variable and replace the string with another string such as 'X', 'XYZ', or 'ABCDEF'. In RPG this can be done using the builtins %scan and %replace but the XCL command provides even more function.

For example with FNDRPLSXCL you can elect to ignore case differences - that is 'ABC' will match 'Abc', 'abc', and 'aBC'. You can, with XCL, also take into consideration CCSID differences such as scanning for 'ABC' when the CL variable contains ASCII or Unicode data. The integrated CCSID support of XCL can greatly simplify your development efforts when working with mixed system environments such as Windows, Unix, the internet, and/or multiple national languages. High level languages such as RPG and COBOL have no direct support for these types of additional functions.

XCL commands are provided in various categories where you can choose which command sets are applicable to the needs of your company. The categories available, and the commands provided within each category, are growing in number. The categories available at this time are:

Ordering a command category entitles you to all future commands that are added to that category.

All command categories come with a 30-day trial period.

Though not a separate command category, the no-charge eXtreme CL base option also provides various commands. One Base Option command is Edit Variable allowing you to apply an edit code or edit word to a CL variable of TYPE(*DEC).

If you have any suggestions on future commands and/or categories we would enjoy hearing from you.