"Graham, Robert" wrote:
>
> someone wrote:
>
> > I have worked with systems of moderate to extreme complexity based upon
> > PowerHouse and PowerHouse alone. The dictum was, if you can't do it in PH
> > then it cannot be done...
>
> Actually, that is MOSTLY true.
>

At the last place I worked, I was a strong advocate of the "if it can't be
done in PH, then we shouldn't do it" approach.  However, we did write our
official student transcript output in Cobol.  It took output from quiz (or
qtp?) and formatted the lines to provide a two column style.  We could get
only quiz/qtp to do this by very round about means and it was too hard to
get the column breaks to look right printed on paper.  Perhaps we could
have written it in Quick's procedural language, but what would be the
point?

A neat trick in that design was to divide up the complexity.  The Cobol
was simple and had little knowledge of what it was doing.  It depended
upon sorting and line break codes passed in the data from quiz.  If we
needed to add anything or change the order of the output, we just changed
the quiz code to pass the right values to the Cobol.

Richard
--
Richard L Gambrell,
Database Administrator and
Consultant to Computing Services at UTC

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