S36 Environment

Yep that old thing!



Situation is like this:



I have a client that have their main application running ? unchanged ? in
the S36 environment for ages. Not a single change has been done to the
programs for the last 20 years.



And they are totally happy with the way it works.



I have been asked to do a review of what they have and found that their
servers are old and soon to be unsupported by IBM and also that they need to
get a modern version of the operating system.



This would mean a spanking new Power-9 server (smallest possible) with V7R4
on it.



But there is imho very little to gain by moving their old app to native
mode. From all I have seen there is a lot of manual tinkering involved even
for the cases where tools might still be available.



You would need to convert OCL to CL, convert internally described files to
external (database, workstation and printer) and do loads of manual fixes
with the code. And gain very little in the process.



So here is the question: Does anyone know if the S36 environment is
available for the V7R4? I have heard that it was there for V7R3 so I
assume/hope that it is still available.



If not: Are there any really good tools out there that can do a full
conversion to native? (Eliminating the RPG cycle, level indicators, OCL,
files?)???