Tailoring for Performance › Determining Program Size

Determining Program Size

Determining the right size for programs is relative to your business needs. Some applications benefit from large, complex programs to simplify navigation for the user. However, keeping programs small has several advantages including:

• Reusable components (code dedicated to the data it processes)
• Easier maintenance
• Simpler debugging
• Quicker generation and compilation
• Less code duplication
• More flexibility for grouping processes

Large programs are prone to dead code, used only once or not at all. Breaking processes into smaller programs allows you to identify such areas of code. You can selectively invoke them or remove them following completion.

Your panel design requirements should determine how you create the main function. However, within a given transaction from this program, several functions can be executed. You can make some of these functions the function type, EXCEXTFUN, to encapsulate functions or to isolate seldom executed functions.