RE: SAA Historical perspective and education

Reeve wrote:
>The concept of "lowest common denominator" is key to achieving
portability.
>We S/38-types tooled merrily along with our multi-format logicals, etc.
and
>hoped the rest of The World would catch up to us.

Forgive me for being blunt, but while AS/400 programmers were
programming physical and logical files using DDS, the rest of
the world was using SQL.  Fortunately, the AS/400 finally
caught on and provided an SQL interface to its database.  But
does SQL on the iSeries still lack full outer joins?

(Sorry, I wish I could be more cheerful on a Friday afternoon.)

BTW, while "lowest common denominator" used to be the key to
achieving portability (and pretty much sums up why SAA failed),
today, there are portable SQL database access methods and
portable widget toolkits and portable languages and portable
data interchange protocols and portable presentation protocols.
The programming world is a lot different now than it was 15
years ago.  Now if you do things right right from the start,
you don't have to give up functionality to achieve portability.

Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com