For me, the transition to the HP3000 was a difficult one, although I had
experience in COBOL on an EBCDIC type machine and knew IBM Instruction Set
and Assembly Language; I also wrote some COBOL on the System 36.

You have two major obstacles: TurboImage Database Calls and VPlus Calls.

You will have to learn to navigate your way around both the network style
database and the screens of VPlus to have any meaningful relationship with
the HP3000 and maintain the applications there.

The first obstacle I encountered were "intrinsics" and I kept asking
myself, "What in Heck are intrinsics?":  Intrinsics are system subroutine
calls (or SVCs) for various services; these are used [somewhat differently]
than the TurboImage and VPlus "intrinsic" (subroutine) calls in style and
format.

The concepts for using the two facilities for databases and screens are
simple in concept:  There are calls for OPEN, GET, PUT, CLOSE, etc that use
certain parameter areas which hold such things as file handles, status, etc.

COBOL gets an assist in the "CALL INTRINSIC" by having a mechanism for
aligning up the operands in type and reference for the intrinsic.

The HP3000 COBOL has a nice feature of using MACROs, as well as COPY
statements to assist the programming effort.

Except for the intrinsics, TurboImage, and VPlus, the COBOL85 is pretty
much standard and has fairly sophisticated facilities, such as the KSAM
[Keyed Sequential Access Method (or VSAM for IBM or ISAM for everybody
else)].

If you are used to using DB2, and the folks you work for spring for some
extra money, ALLBASE is a pretty good look-alike, but watch out for setting
up the database and those workspaces!

The Editor is not as friendly as ISPF/PDF, and I would suggest that you get
your employer to spring for Programmer's Studio
[http://www.programmerstudio.com/].

After you get used to the environment, you might even like it better, but
the quesion I would have for you is, "Why?", because of the such limited
future for MPE i/X.

If this does not satisfy your thirst, feel free to enquire further.

Douglas Becker
www.all2true.org

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