> very, very clever FSVO
> people decided they would write application modules in assembler... So far, so good. > and not waste time with comments. That's a disaster in any language. But I can't remember the last time I saw an assembler program with no comments. > All the Utilities were written in PL/S, now PL/X. Can you say GENERATE? ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Jon Butler <butler....@gmail.com> Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 8:04 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: AI expert hot new position. There will be a need for assembler programmers for quite a while, but mainly because over the last forty years, and long after even COBOL II added functions and a case construction in 1987, very, very clever people decided they would write application modules in assembler... and not waste time with comments. Today, when companies are trying to make their systems Highly Available...or even convert to a cloud provider's service...no one has a clue what the modules do. Many could have been easily replaced by COBOL's ADDRESS OF or LENGTH OF or PL/I Pointers, but of course that would have been way too easy. Very few application programs need to control channels. When I was interviewed by the Db2 Utilities group at the Santa Teresa lab in San Jose (Now Silicon Valley) in 2001, I said I suppose I needed to brush up on my assembler. They laughed and said "no one uses assembler any more." All the Utilities were written in PL/S, now PL/X. Not to denigrate assembler programmers, or those that decide to take up Sanskrit, but it is a dying art. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
