Re: RPG III (RPG/400)

Yeah Scott, I agree with that for vendors - and maybe less so for in-house shops - I'm inclined to extend a little grace there, since that's where I am now. I think I could say that if people did not do the conversion at the time, and not later, either, you eventually get a backlog that may have insufficient ROI in the eyes of management. We have been on IBM midrange systems at least since the 80s - I suspect back to 36s even. Now even the funky RPG II stuff can be converted to RPG IV - but not always easily to fully-free format, as i just tried to do and backed out due to time constraints and limited resources - always limited time or people or whatever!

On 10/23/2015 1:26 AM, Scott Klement wrote:

Vern,

To add to what Jon said, I will point out something that you probably already knew, but maybe you (or others here) hadn't thought about...

RPG/400 was originally released in 1988. It was supplanted by the ILE RPG (RPG IV) compiler in 1994. (and at that time, CVTRPGSRC was available to make a painless conversion to RPG IV). that means:

RPG/400 was "the RPG to use" for 6 years.
RPG IV has been "the RPG to use" for 21 years since then.

The fact that a software vendor, who charges for their software and maintenance, hasn't managed to update in 21 years is more than a little absurd.

It requires only the tiniest investment to convert, and a company you are paying maintenance to hasn't been able to do so in 21 years? 3.5 times as long as the total lifecycle of the language they're converting from? Yeah. Something is really wrong here.


On 10/22/2015 11:17 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Yeah, I can agree with that - guess I'm feeling the lumps and bruises of
trying to turn O-specs with ADD and DEL modifiers into fully-free!
Ouch!! #@$%!%! Even making a new program to do what a really old one
does, and trying to convert a copy of the old one - sheesh!!!

I TRIED! REALLY I DID!