RE: OT - Shutting down an RS/6000 ?

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Hans Boldt
>
> I may be wrong, but I don't think I ever argued that Posix commands
> were not cryptic. On the other hand, I disagree with the proposition
> that OS/400 programmers are incapable of learning those "cryptic"
> commands.

And I never said that Unix commands were not powerful, nor that piping isn't
a great tool.  Just that, for my feeble little brain, that OS/400 commands
seem to be arranged more logically and thus are easier to remember.

I know for a fact that OS/400 developers can learn Unix; I did it myself
back in a previous life.  When I wrote the Unix equivalents for various
OS/400 capabilities, like OVRDBF and MONMSG, I learned quite a bit about the
platform.  This happened to be HP/UX.  And that's where I got my comparison
of the two.  Personally, I still think Unix is a little rudimentary - it's
over 30 years old, fer goshsakes, and it shows it - but it has many powerful
features nonetheless and it's the best solution for a certain class of
programming tasks.

As you pointed out, comparing OS/400 and *nix is a little like comparing
coconuts and clocksprings, but there is one area that really got me back in
the old days, which was the lack of bidirectional program parameters.  The
ability to pass parameters between programs (even programs of different
languages) has long been one of the most important features of the IBM
midrange, since the S/38 days in fact, and yet was unavailable in HP/UX.  We
had to get around the problem by writing parameters to a file and reading
them back in when the called program ended.  Not very elegant.  There's
probably a better way to do it today, but I've never found one.

Joe