John Chase wrote: | "Everybody" has a SORT utility. Not everybody has a [PL/I|other HLL] compiler.
This, I suppose, is nearly true. Not quite everyone has DFSORT or SYNCHSORT, and almost everyone has some IBM statement-level procedural-language compiler and the HLASM; but neither of these factoids is very interesting. The gaseous diffusion plant in Hanford, Washington, was designed originally by Enrico Fermi. In came in the end to be run by civil servants, not one of whom was a member of the American Physical Society. It did the same thing for 40 years. What finally emerged about what that was is well documented, and the area around and downwind of that Hanford facility will be contaminated for generations. No mainframe shop is at all likely to be guilty of equally serious crimes, but the analogy is instructive. zArchitecture machines are superb, and z/OS is the best operating system (for any hardware) we have. The uses that are made of them are mostly contemptible, not in what they do but in how they do it (and what they omit to do). Those who argue that they have no one available to write/maintain C, PL/I, assembly language, whatever are, I am sure, describing their situations accurately; but they must understand that there is a point of view from which all SLPLs are very similar. Answers to the same three old questions---What are the data types? What operations can be performed on them? How is the path of control among these operations specified?---characterize every SLPL; and those who cannot learn a new one in a few days should be doing other work. Enough! It will be some months before I allow my impatience to break out again. --jg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
