RPG on the mainframewhy never popular 814

learning Well, that depends on the type of work to be done. My background was in a traditional commercial shop : invoicing, personnel, stock, ordering, bonus payments, salaries, etc etc. When I came around, they had just shifted from a 1401 to a 360-40, and most was (then) written in Autocoder and RPG. A lot of jobs were still done on unit record equipment (mainly 517, 82, and the collator), and those jobs were implemented in cobol, but still in a sequential fashion.

It is my opionion, that many things were easier in RPG then in Cobol; e.g. you didnt have to bother with opening files, funny loops, "ALTER TO PROCEED TO (there was not enough core memory for proper programming)" (shudder, I have to change my underware), etc. Defining a report was very easy.

Not yet quite on topic, but anyway: Some years ago, I had to develop an in-line validation routine, so data coming from media (my main activity is in media conversion) would only be sent on to the mainfram when valid. For the conversion jobs, I use InterMedia for Windows. For every inputfile, 1 output file would be created. I then wrote a DLL intercepting the data, and this DLL is in fact a RPG interpreter. How to write the PRG statements ? By means of a Windows-based RPG editor ! If this stirrs some interest : look at www.farumdata.dk-enval.htm (or nlval.htm for dutch lurkers :-) )