Hi Folks,
     Brian stired a few old brain cells when he told the story of  
working in an IBM shop. When I was working for HP Corporate at their  
IBM mainframe DPC at 1501 Page Mill RD(3L was the place) back in  
1972, I was trying to create the equivalent of passing info from one  
process to another without creating a file and when I approached the  
IBM sytems programmer about it, his first response was "Why would you  
want to do that?". He missed the whole point. It was because I could  
imagine it and it would make a very clean solution to my problem. A  
year later I transferred to HP's MSD/OED division down the street and  
when they decided to become the first HP division to go with the  
HP3000CX I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. In my mind still the  
best business OS out there.

         Eric Sand


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Brian Donaldson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: October 4, 2007 12:39:54 PM PDT
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] KSAMXL Question/Problem -- Key Info  
> (Continued)
> Reply-To: Brian Donaldson <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Yep, exactly.
>
> I need to be able to pass file numbers to FREADLABEL, FWRITELABEL,
> FGETKEYINFO and also AIF's.... to name a few.
>
> The stupid standard COBOL open/read/write/rewrite/close reserved words
> don't do anything for me.
>
> Another thing about intrinsics is that when an intrinsic fails, by  
> calling FCHECK
> and FERRMSG you get a more sensible error message than COBOL would  
> give
> you. Who would know what a COBOL error 47 is without having to go  
> look up
> the manual?
>
> Intrinsics (for me, at least) are the only way to go..........
>
> Once upon a time, in a previous lifetime I worked in an IBM shop  
> that had a
> RISC6000/AIX box using Microfocus COBOL. I have been so used to  
> working
> on the HP3000 for so long it was a major shock when I discovered just
> how "stupid" that IBM box really is compared to the intelligent  
> HP3000.
> I asked one of the IBM programmer's how I would find out what the  
> EOF on
> a file was. "What system intrinsics do you use to get file info  
> without having to
> read thru a trillion records to get a record count?" He looked at  
> me as if I had
> been beamed down off the Starship Enterprise...
>
> No system intrinsics on that box and yes, you would have to read thru
> the file, adding one to a counter until you hit the eof.
>
> However, that is a topic for another posting........
>
> Oh yeah, -- I didn't realize I belonged to the "old school"
> (whatever school that is) -- Eton? Cambridge? Oxford? UCLA? :-)
>
>
> Brian.
>
>
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007 13:13:51 -0400, Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>  
> wrote:
>
>> Robert Mills wrote:
>>> Brian,
>>>
>>> Why are you using FOPEN and not the Cobol Open?
>>
>> I'd guess it's an old-school way of keeping a handle on the MPE  
>> filenumber.
> COBOL didn't always (IIRC) let you use FD names to supply  
> filenumbers to
> intrinsics (for one), and manually doing your FOPENs/etc let you  
> pass opened
> files into and out of COBOL subroutines without the default open/ 
> close upon
> subroutine entry/exit like the old-school required.
>>
>> Jeff
>>

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