AS/400 How does it look?

[Terrence Enger]

On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 15:42 -0700, Rob Sutherland wrote:
> > And for this purpose, you can include application
> > programmers with the
> > users (if you did not mean that already).  One of the
> > reasons for my
> > productivity as a programmer--pay no attention to the
> > jeering from the
> > cheap seats--is the vast amount of advanced technology
> > which I need not
> > pay attention to.
> 
> Amen to that. The amount of sheer jerking about you have to do
> to keep up with the latest is awesome. I got a lot more accomplished when it was just me, a text editor and a compiler. System 34 etc were not
> too bad

Well, I fer shur can get sucked into nostalgia.  It is good that there
is the occasional customer with work to do on an old system; the need to
get some work done can be a quick albeit shocking cure.

>  - OTOH, using MVS was kind of like kicking a dead
> whale down the beach. I must admit, I kind of liked 'programming' in
> RPG, once you memorized the flowchart, that is :-)

Indeed.  Younger RPG programmers boast that they will do almost anything
to avoid using "the cycle".

Myself, I am comfortable with the cycle, but even in the old apps I have
to maintain, I don't see it very often.  If I had to write a new
program, and there was a good reason to use the cycle, then I would use
it; I just can't remember when that last happened.

( Explanation to Linux geeks:  RPG "Report Program Generator" is a
programming language where every program implicitly iterates over the
records of zero or more files.  The implict code can merge presorted
files, and it can execute sections of code at "level breaks".  A level
break is a change in the value in an input field.  Sigh!  This is a lie,
but it is the best I can do if I expect *anybody* to read so far. )

Cheers,
Terry.

> 
> Rob 
> Rob Sutherland
> http://www.myspace.com/gylany


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists