Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Robert Prins, aka prino, the name given to him by a chemistry teacher who could not read his own handwriting, way back in 1974(?), is a currently unemployed z/OS analyst-programmer, who's been working with mainframes since September 1985. He's Dutch, lived and worked in the UK for 16 years, and moved to Belgium (big mistake ) some seven years ago. He's a hands-on guy, has worked all his life with PL/I, and is probably one of the few people who can report bugs (half a dozen so far) in the PL/I compiler directly to its developers. His in-depth PL/I knowledge has resulted in one of his suggestions being incorporated into the PL/I Programming Guide, and another being incorporated into Enterprise PL/I V4.4 - both of them can potentially save significant amounts of CPU.

His other strength is REXX, and he's the maintainer of CBT Tape 769, a set of REXX edit macros that can be used to translate legacy languages (PL/I, REXX, COBOL, z/OS assembler and JCL) into nicely formatted and Edit-Hilite'd HTML.

He's also familiar with CICS, DB2 and IDMS.

In his spare time he likes to hitchhike, and even made it into the Guinness Book of Records (1991 UK edition) as the hitchhiker who covered the greatest distance in 24 hours: on 5 July 1989 he hitched from Southern Yugoslavia to Hamburg, a distance of 2,318.4 km.

Hello Robert and Welcome to the Forums,

It's nice to see you here, that means we're making some progress!

Thanks for introducing yourself, it's an insightful introduction. It's tough to hear someone of your caliber is looking for a Job, hopefully this gets over soon. Unless I'm mistaken this is one of the suggestions from you:

- The ALLOCATE built-in function is extended so that an AREA may be specified as an optional second argument thereby allowing users to allocate arbitrarily sized chunks of storage from AREAs as well as from heap storage.

You keep on diverting my mind to hitchhiking -- I did this a lot during school days but never knew that I could actually build a record around it. OTOH, CBT Tape 769 is in my collections now and will work with it as soon as I get a Mainframes system access. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I'm in a kind of profile which keeps me virtually out of Job.

And one more thing -- so the Chemistry teacher wrote it wrong or pronounced it wrong?

Have a nice stay here,