Howdy,

Certainly not interested much in language wars.  Reminds me of my
younger years and the constant Ford/Chevy/Mopar bickering.  No
one ever gave up their pride and joy and no one ever won the argument.

Anyhow.  I'm on Cecils side.  Micro Focus may be the do all and
end all of COBOL but what about us poor little nerds out here that
ain't got it/can't afford it?  We use the vanilla COBOL from HP.

James (I *gotta* get a life (and a car)) Trudeau

----------
From:   Stigers, Greg ~ AND
Sent:   Friday, November 07, 1997 12:18 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Transact Programs

It ain't necessarily so. This kind of problem indicates problems in the
design of the programs, and / or problems with the toolset. This is one
of the things that is great about using MicroFocus WorkBench and
developing on the LAN (just with that they had an integrated product for
the 3K as they do for mainframes), and having a highly modular design.
We just expanded the policy number field in our insurance app with half
the people and in one-fourth of the time that the vendor said they would
need, and our environments much are the same. We have good tools, we
know how to use them, and we understand how to design large apps. Not to
toot my own horn, since I did none of the coding, but worked on the
schema changes for when we moved up to the 3K. Now, due to poor design
or complete lack of design, that was a nightmare, but that was clearly
not an IMAGE problem. In fact, I first tested the proposed changes with
Adager, which made that part a thing of beauty.

But I am happy for you that Transact is making your maintenance easier.

>----------
>From:  CECILE CHI[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Thursday, November 06, 1997 6:55 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       Re: [HP3000-L] Transact Programs
>
>But in order to see everything in a program you need to look at several
>COPYLIB members, or else generate a compile listing.
>Cobol code may be faster to write using copylibs, but maintenance is
>slowed down considerably.
>I am rewriting some Cobol programs in Transact to make them easier to
>read and understand, and particularly to make them easier to maintain.
>
>Cecile Chi
>