Re: RPG III (RPG/400)

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah Scott, I agree with that for vendors - and maybe less so for 
in-house shops - I'm inclined to extend a little grace there, since 
that's where I am now. I think I could say that if people did not do the 
conversion at the time, and not later, either, you eventually get a 
backlog that may have insufficient ROI in the eyes of management. We 
have been on IBM midrange systems at least since the 80s - I suspect 
back to 36s even. Now even the funky RPG II stuff can be converted to 
RPG IV - but not always easily to fully-free format, as i just tried to 
do and backed out due to time constraints and limited resources - always 
limited time or people or whatever!

On 10/23/2015 1:26 AM, Scott Klement wrote:
> Vern,
>
> To add to what Jon said, I will point out something that you probably 
> already knew, but maybe you (or others here) hadn't thought about...
>
> RPG/400 was originally released in 1988.  It was supplanted by the ILE 
> RPG (RPG IV) compiler in 1994.  (and at that time, CVTRPGSRC was 
> available to make a painless conversion to RPG IV).  that means:
>
> RPG/400 was "the RPG to use" for 6 years.
> RPG IV has been "the RPG to use" for 21 years since then.
>
> The fact that a software vendor, who charges for their software and 
> maintenance, hasn't managed to update in 21 years is more than a 
> little absurd.
>
> It requires only the tiniest investment to convert, and a company you 
> are paying maintenance to hasn't been able to do so in 21 years?  3.5 
> times as long as the total lifecycle of the language they're 
> converting from?  Yeah.  Something is really wrong here.
>
>
> On 10/22/2015 11:17 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:
> > Yeah, I can agree with that - guess I'm feeling the lumps and bruises of
> > trying to turn O-specs with ADD and DEL modifiers into fully-free!
> > Ouch!! #@$%!%! Even making a new program to do what a really old one
> > does, and trying to convert a copy of the old one - sheesh!!!
> >
> > I TRIED! REALLY I DID!