There were apparently several "VISAMs" around, because OCCURS DEPENDING is such a basic feature of COBOL but RECFM=V was not supported by ISAM.
I had a client (not FSA but interestingly also in the financial package software business) that had its own homegrown (AFAIK) VISAM. It used short fixed-length ISAM records with keys and a pointer to variable length BDAM records. I remember it because I wrote some software that utilized it (but I was not at all involved in its development). Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tony Thigpen Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 8:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: PARM= vs PARMDD= and symbol substitution Digging back into my mind for data from 1983: Third National of Nashville (TNB) ran a bank data processing site in Florence, AL. The main bank there was First National (FNB). TNB decided to close up shop in Florence so FNB took their data processing in-house. FNB did not have a data processing department before this. I was one of three programmers hired by FNB for this new department. The complete staff from the TNB site was hired by FNB with the permission of TNB as the operational staff. We converted the data from TNB in-house written code to a set of programs from an Orlando base software provider Financial Software of America (FSA), later bought by UCC to become part of the new UCCEL company, later acquired by CA and so forth. The one system FSA did not have yet, but we needed, was a loan processing package. (They were writing it, but it was not yet available.) TNB decided to give FNB the complete source for their Loan System. It was in assembler and I was tasked to convert it from MVS (or what ever at that time) to DOS/SIPO (predecessor to z/VSE). What I found was interesting. The system used something called VISAM, or "variable length ISAM". It was not a big problem to convert it to VSAM, but here is the story I got about VISAM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
