Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi guys!
I'm very happy to join this forum and exchange all of our ideas, big or small, silly or serious.

Been in mainframe IT for 40+ years, from PL/1 programmer through Assembler, COBOL, CICS, Software AG products, and onto diverse but extremely interesting innovative areas such as Flex-ES and Platform Solutions (the old Amdahl guys), arguably laying claim to having installed more of these systems in Customers throughout Europe, Japan and the USA than anybody else.
I live in Nottingham, UK, which allows relatively easy access to all parts of the UK, and of course the world!

As you can therefore tell, I so enjoy Systems Programming (albeit that it gets so annoying and frustrating at times too! ), and more recently have become the Sys Prog in charge of a multi-user developers' z/OS v2.2 system, which leads to all manner of off-the-wall information requests in areas that usually a separate specialist would tackle. As such, it's extremely interesting, and never boring!
Watch this space for further news of our exciting truly leading-edge mainframe systems solution as it become rolled out to the world.

Meanwhile, I'll always appreciate help and advice from those of you who undoubtedly have more experience than myself in your specialist areas.

Looking forward to interacting with you frequently!
Kind regards,
Alan

Hello [username|#000000|normal|1291]alanplayford[/username] and welcome the Forums,

It's nice to know about your great experience. It really feel nice to get surrounded by members like you. We have some more members, on the website, comparable to your level of years of experience, I'm sure having you all here will bring in a unique experience for all of us and we look forward to that for sure.

Yesterday I was talking to one of my known, who is getting into a project having PL/1. My experience in to PL/1(I?) is pretty less so I was not very sure (on tool name) to answer him on his question which went like this , "is there any free compiler/tool to learn PL/1 available out there?" Do you know one?

OTOH, with my little experience I always believed that PL/I was a language ahead of its time, back then, no? What do you say?

Anuj,
Thanks for the great welcome!

No, I'm not aware of anything out there that can help learn PL/1 either, but it's been a good few years since I last really used it in anger anyway, so I'm certainly not current as to offerings?

PL/1 was DEFINITELY ahead of it's time, incorporating pointer features way ahead of later COBOL and other languages (excepting Assembler of course!), but of course these have all caught up now? I believe it has a dwindling Customer base, with the later features of COBOL v4 and then v5 taking over, and especially as it has far better documentation capabilities. Amazing that such an old 3GL is still the people's choice, even if there's a quickly-diminishing load of dinosaurs like us who can support it? ;-)

alanplayford wrote: PL/1 was DEFINITELY ahead of it's time, incorporating pointer features way ahead of later COBOL and other languages (excepting Assembler of course!), but of course these have all caught up now? I believe it has a dwindling Customer base, with the later features of COBOL v4 and then v5 taking over, and especially as it has far better documentation capabilities. Amazing that such an old 3GL is still the people's choice, even if there's a quickly-diminishing load of dinosaurs like us who can support it? ;-)

Yes. And read this, which I pick fom one of the article:

Despite their age PL/1 optimizing and debugging compilers for OS/360 and 370 are probably the best compliers for any language of similar complexity in existence despite being 40 years old. The real masterpieces of software engineering... Incredible achievement of IBM engineering talent. Like System 360 hardware and assembler language they stood as monuments to "good old IBM".

With my little experience with PL/1, I could not agree more.

For that matter - lately, I had been in frequent discussion whether IMS should be considered as an alternative to the modern NoSQL databases and the discussion seems endless, for most part of it. Should we say old is till gold!?

There's a small but significant base of PL/I out there (from which I have made part of my living for the last 20 years ), but I don't think there are any new installations. The z/OS world seems to have decided that COBOL now has enough features that it can be used for any new development (and I don't say that that is wrong).

Akatsukami wrote: ... but I don't think there are any new installations. The z/OS world seems to have decided that COBOL now has enough features that it can be used for any new development (and I don't say that that is wrong).

Yup, agree.