Re: OT: Re: How to work with Arrays using positional RPG IV -- RPG400-L

I spent 6 weeks trying to find a big in the S/34 COBOL compiler ... turns out it was mostly due to an idiot programmer whose twiddling of bits in an instruction didn't actually do what his comments said! It did the opposite. But as you know the debugging was primitive to put it mildly. Takes a long time to debug when stepping one instruction at a time!

And no - i don't remember it fondly!

On Aug 25, 2020, at 4:49 PM, Bruce Vining <bruce.vining@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jon,

Oh no, PL/MI is nothing like assembler (which I'm well aware you know).
I'm talking 370 and (does anyone remember it?) the S/34. Oh those were the
days, microfiche for the operating system and away you go :)

On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 5:10 PM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Assembler" as in PL/MI Bruce ? I suspect that even MI would be too high
level if you really want to bit twiddle!

Interestingly had the original question been about C or MI I could
understand it since they still have utility. It was ancient RPG that got me
and (at the time) I didn't know we were talking V5R4.

On Aug 22, 2020, at 3:07 PM, Bruce Vining <bruce.vining@xxxxxxxxx>

wrote:

I feel a great appeal to the way the (older) machines are engineered

I agree. In a similar vein, my favorite language is assembler though
assembler is NOT at the top of my productivity languages. But it is so

fun

:)

On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 2:59 PM Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Jon,

Am 22.08.2020 um 19:38 schrieb Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Each to his own perversion I guess.

Exactly.

Messing with a Commodore is fun though (albeit slow fun) but fixed from

RPG?

Where's the fun in cumbersome PEEK and POKE because of the limitations

of

the ROM-Basic? How can it be fun to put your programs on really slow

audio

cassettes, with the need to manual adjust volume for omitting

distortion?

Where's the joy about sitting in front of an old, blurry and 60 Hz

refresh

TV giving you a headache from flickering? How can even typing on that
dreaded keyboard even be fun?

Maybe this helps you understand. ;-)

Sorry the joy completely escapes me - it is not as if the world needs

any more examples - there are enough of them out there.

I guess because you're doing IBM i for a living, and you've gone through
all the modernization features you learned to love, I assert you have a
different, professional view on the topic. :-)

My first real AS/400 experience started not much more than a decade ago,
from zero, with a model 400 with a license V4R4 and erased disks. Even

my

solid background on Linux and Networking wasn't of much help. I'm not

doing

all of that for a living, but because I can, because I want and because

I

feel a great appeal to the way the (older) machines are engineered.

:wq! PoC

PGP-Key: DDD3 4ABF 6413 38DE - https://www.pocnet.net/poc-key.asc

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