RE: system p announcement

Jerry,

Unlike you and me, Steve has all ten of his fingers. He thinks it's funny to
abuse the digitally challenged. :-))

Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 512-392-2577
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jerry Adams
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 3:21 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: system p announcement

True, everything has a limitation (price) associated with it. Regarding
the 10 character limitation, at least as displayed by system utilities
(the i5 itself has no such limitation), I've never quite grasped that as
a problem. Maybe it's because I worked on 3/34/36 systems where the
limitation was eight, and I started on PC's with DOS 2.0.

Also, one of the "advantages" to Cobol (or so I was told) was its long
field names. Hell, Cobol programmers are just as lazy as the rest of
us. Instead of "Total-Sales-Division", they usually wrote TSLSDV. I
know that has nothing to do with object names and RPG IV blew that
limitation away (at least as regards program-defined fields), but it is
illustrative.

Long object names are nice when viewing a list of objects, such as
spreadsheets or even data files. But I get real cranky if typing those
object names when keying a program causes me to miss my morning coffee.
Just don't see it as a disadvantage; been dealing with it for way too
many years.


* Jerry C. Adams
*IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale Distributors, Inc.* *
voice
615.995.7024
fax
615.995.1201
email
jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>



Steve Richter wrote:

On 11/7/07, Jerry Adams <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Don't forget to build in the cost of a security package and anything
else that costs extra in AIX, not just the DBMS.

ok, but then there are the shortfalls. max 10 char object names,
ebcdic char set. AIX and Linux have x-windows which I guess is better
than 5250. There are likely more software vendors and applications
available for AIX or Linux than i5/OS.

Put it this way: If i5/OS is priced the same as AIX and there are no
hardware restrictions, will AIX users switch to i5/OS?