Re: AS/SET was:Single Vendor Payment Selection

Back when AS/SET first came out RPG was languishing for changes. It had
been years since you could get any significant changes to RPG. AS/SET
offered a choice between copying an existing program and changing a
bazillion variables and whatnot to generating a new one using their
software. It worked pretty good. And if you kept out of the generated
RPG you could retain your sanity. AS/SET was good enough it was even
being sold to shops that didn't use BPCS.

I tried to encourage our staff to not keep the RPG source. There is a
method to take their action diagramming, generate the source into QTEMP,
and have the process generate the object code from the QTEMP source. My
reason being was to reduce the temptation to just change the source
instead of going through the AS/SET action diagramming. It didn't fly.

Then IBM came out with numerous changes to RPG. Including numerous
structured programming codes that previously could only be mimicked using
techniques like AS/SET did. Now AS/SET was languishing behind. About the
only major change that AS/SET did was take their code and run CVTRPGSRC on
it. This allowed it to be used in modules and what not but they never
changed to use newer RPG techniques. Perhaps their logic was it still
generated useful stuff, you could now use it in modules. What business
reason was there to put new stuff in the underlying engine? Much like a
steady diet of gruel will fill your gut and produce poop at the end so why
do you need a varied menu? It's not like they were trying to market
AS/SET anymore and many people kept paying the maintenance cash cow. About
this time they started generating all their BPCS code with AS/SET. Oh, I
suppose you could give them the benefit of the doubt and figure their
reason was altruistic and they were just trying to show they believed in
the product enough to eat their own cooking. The conspiracy theorists
will say it was to lock more people into AS/SET.

Our developers would sooner throw themselves in front of a truck than to
use AS/SET to generate a new program. And you would have to really
shackle them to use the AS/SET tool versus changing the underlying source.
I think they occasionally still use it for some existing maintenance.

I served on the AS/SET user group board of directors.

Please do not start a new thread by replying to an existing email. It
confuses the archives. Also, if you are going to ignore me on that then
at least do not reply WITH HISTORY!

Rob Berendt