Re: delete records from a S/36 (QS36F) file?

[Douglas Handy <dhandy1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan,

>I should have phrased the question better.  What I was really after was
>whether S/36 files were typically not delete-capable.

That depends on the programmer. <g>

Delete capable files were added to SSP in around release 5 or 6 of S/34 (not
S/36).  But to provide backward compatibility, the default was to create a file
which is not delete capable.  The keyword DFILE-YES (or NO) was added to the //
FILE statement in OCL (with a default of NO), and a parameter was added to
BLDFILE to specify either NDFILE or DFILE, but again the default was NDFILE for
backward compatibility.  The S/36 (and thus the S36EE) continue those same
defaults.

Whether files on a given system were typically delete capable has alot to do
with how old the applications are.    Another real clue is when the job stream
uses the ORGANIZE procedure instead of COPYDATA to purge deleted records.

>I was going to surmise that S/36 RPG-II did not allow a program to delete
>records from a file, but then RPG-II has always had the DEL option on the
>O-spec, hasn't it?

It was added around S/34 release 5 or 6 as I recall, which would put in
somewhere around 1980 when the S/38 was first shipped to customers.

Doug