Re: Learning SEU, Source members, etc for the non I programmer?

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:39 AM Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I see the winky, and strongly suggest it be replaced with 'nota bene'.

It's not a mere technicality that SEU is frozen.

I write fully free RPG. Compiles only in 7.1 and 7.2, which works great
because I only have to worry about my one machine, and that's at 7.2.
The first time one of my SEU-using colleagues opened up one of my
programs he immediately started blaming SEU, broken PTFs, etc, etc, etc.
Because his SEU screen was lit up as green as a radar set in New York
Harbour.

But there aren't any bad PTFs, SEU isn't broken - it's unable to
recognise current level code so it flags it as a syntax error. One can
use SEU and one can change lines of source with it - even the ones
showing as syntax errors. My colleagues have turned syntax checking off
in SEU because they're tired of the headache-inducing screens.

It's all well and good to nudge each other in the ribs over the 'demise'
of SEU but a newcomer needs to understand that using SEU could very well
result in a situation where he thinks /his environment/ is broken, when
in fact it is just the way that SEU is going to work from now on.

Buck, this talk of syntax notation evokes two questions.


1. The practical question. A client who is an RPG guy that was calling
PHP I wrote, and one point sent me a 5250 screen shot of him opening my PHP
file on the IFS. It looked like SEU to me, but I at that point hadn't
opened SEU in over a decade, so actually it looked like my PHP source code
in a client access screenshot. Is there another text editor for 5250
sessions for editing text files on the IFS or is that also SEU? Is that
editor also in PDM?
2. Not so practical. A lot of greenscreeners like SEU. Some small subset
have some intricate knowlege of system level programming, or at least the
capability to learn. Has anyone asked IBM to release SEU as open source?
Maybe since you have a hard screen size limitation with the 5250 terminal
you could never make SEU as productive as lets say VIM (a unix cmdline text
editor that is similarly weird), but I think you could still make something
that a power user would be extremely productive in.