On Jun 17, 2012, at 2:06 AM, Tom Ross wrote:
I know there is no reaching cranky Ed, but for others I can help:
The only reason I am cranky is I have been on the receiving end of
*SO* many irate calls to the systems group complaining about the bad
manuals. AFter 50 you give up.
Somewhere around the mid 1990's IBM seem to have done a reverse and
either stop issuing manuals (eg COBOL MESSAGES AND CODES) or made
The issue of COBOL compiler messages was discussed here, and most
agreed
it would not be that helpful, since it would mostly say 'please see
the
COBOL Language Reference Manual'.
Yes only after asking for it many many times. This is getting to be a
sticking point with IBM
them so complicated to read (COBOL conversion guide) it takes a
lawyer to understand them (not only do you have to by a lawyer you
have to have technical knowledge of a guru in order to understand the
vagaries of the writing. That leaves most of the other manuals
difficult or hard to understand.
The COBOL conversion manual is probably the clearest case of manual
writers gone wrong.
IBM has received several RCF (Reader Comment Forms) from customers who
told us that they loved the COBOL Migration Guide (I assume that was
what was meant by 'COBOL conversion manual') and said that it was the
most readable and best IBM manual they had ever seen! The only
negative we have heard is to much info, since we provide migration
paths for EVERY possible scenario.
Ahh the scenario's are so hazy that you need a lawyer to understand
them. I was on the receiving end from IRATE programmers asking me to
parse out the sentences and I got extremely tired of trying to second
guess the "F" manual. We had to end up forming a team of 4 people to
figure out the scenario's that were being called in. Most of the time
we had meetings and came up with well maybe this or this and the
users were just fed up with us coming back with answers like that. It
was in the end if it works great if it doesn't try that. We had users
screaming at us as we could only go by what was in the "fine" manual.
We got burned royally by the conversion. The COLOL to COBOL (II) went
reasonably well except for some of dropped support of items and
trying to work around the dropped items. I could have lived with
some minor issues but being hit over the head on meetings because the
programmers (and us) couldn't figure out the manual was well
embarrassing.
I won't even talk about the LE issues which is another argument and
even worse. Mix the two together and we got a lit dynamite stick put
in our hands by the lovely COBOL & LE people that I still have scars
in my back. I can deal with IBM and their elusive behavior but when
you have people crashing down your office door with pick axes is not
a fun experience.
--->What I will say is that after the conversion (besides one or two
major cobol fights) our daily routine was fighting LE issues. I got
all gray hair over that one and acid indigestion that is still with
me to this day.
Ed
------------------> I have seen the future and with COBOL & LE its
not pretty
Cheers,
TomR >> COBOL is the Language of the Future! <<
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
