Re: porting OS/400 compiler functionality to Windows...

Hello Walden,

You wrote:
>I for one do NOT have a problem with this. The OS/400 is a business
>oriented operating system, not a systems oriented one. On the other hand,
>unix (or AIX in this case) is a systems oriented OS not a business one.
>Let the systems stuff occur on the systems OS and the business stuff
>occur on the business OS.

I really don't want to enter this argument but it is basically the old
'eat your own dog food' statement.  Rochester wrote a whole heap of tools
in order to develop CPF and XPF under VM.  Then they wrote similar tools
to allow them to develop XPF under AIX.  While I accept that there are
more 'programmer' tools available under AIX than on OS/400 that is simply
due to programmers using Unix to develop.  There are many programming
related tools for MVS (zOS), VM, OS/2, Windows, Mac, etc. because
programmers use those and fill the gaps and share or sell what they build.
Because Rochester rarely used the 400 to develop LPPs they never did much
about the programming gaps, and the midrange community has for the most
part been quite happy with the tools Rochester did deliver.

If Rochester had developed on their own OS then those tools would have
been created years ago and many of them would have made it out of the lab
as products or components of products.  For example: SEU is very much like
a cut-down ISPF editor.  If IBM programmers had to use SEU I expect much
of the ISPF editor function would have been made available on the 400.
Xedit is a macro-driven editor on VM (in fact the unkind among us would
suggest that VM is nothing more than a collection of Xedit macros!) that
uses Rexx as one of its supported macro languages.  There are macros that
make Xedit behave very like ISPF.  Again, if IBM programmers had to use
SEU I expect that macro support would be added in short order.  That means
a customisable editor, with Rexx support, focus on Rexx, and a heap of
follow on advantages for AS/400 business programmers.

How long did it take for us to get a decent source comparison tool
provided with our tools?  SuperC existed on MVS and VM for yonks before it
became part of PDM as CMPPFM.  Why did it take so long?  Why did no
enterprising programmer create a similar function to fill the gap?

Developing an OS has much more to do with the language you choose to
program in rather than the OS you choose to develop under.  I find your
basic statement that AIX is more suitable for OS development than OS/400
specious.  I could go on but I really don't care enough.  It is too late
to expect decent 400 tools because now we getting "truly modern" stuff
like CODE/400 and DSU and WDT etc.  All of which are nice ideas but rather
crappy in the implementation -- much of which can be blamed on the crappy
OS they choose to run these tools under.  There is very little in these
'new tools' that would get me to suffer the vagaries of Windoze --
especially when I can remember that CODE/400 was very solid under OS/2 and
is quite flaky under Windows.  Anyway, this is getting off the topic of MI
so I'll stop now.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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   FlyByNight Software         AS/400 Technical Specialists
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