OT: AS/400 and RPG

[Paul Robinson]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 08:19:18AM -0700, Bruce R. Montague wrote:

> appears perhaps it is still considered a primary
> language on the AS/400, perhaps due to the large
> body of legacy apps. I guess they're calling it
> RPG/400?

Yeah, the VisualAge and RPG/400 stuff that's knocking around is pretty good,
but like I said before, Java seems to be language de jour over at
AS/400^W"iSeries" headquarters and we were recently offered an 
iSeries/WebSphere combo which we declined.
 
> that has been offloaded to the database. I'm not
> sure what the "forms support" situation is, but
> it might also be something where there's a lot
> of functionality "under the hood" that might have
> to be re-implemented.

Yeah, RPG/400 these days will do a lot of hand-holding. The question here is 
whether it's appropriate for him to support the app that is 90% finished, or 
take on the re-development in something more "straight forward".
 
> Warning - it's been a quarter century since I used
> RPG! There is some good to be found in most any
> system or language, I do believe I once maintained 
> an RPG "app" on a System/3 with only 8K of memory.

Cool. I got into it because my dad was doing Synon and RPG/400 over in the 
US when I was a teenager (early-1990s) and I just kind of fell in love with 
the machine. For a long time I thought when I graduated I would never have 
to deal with anything else for a portion of my career other than AS/400. It 
wasn't to be, but that's because somebody showed me Unix in the meantime 
which is dirtier and nastier, but also even more arcane and wizard-like. :-)

-- 
Paul Robinson