On Fri, 3 Feb 2012, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote: > In <pine.lnx.4.64.1202022034530.30...@tau.ceti.pl>, on 02/02/2012 > at 10:45 PM, Tomasz Rola <rto...@ceti.com.pl> said: > > >Every time I learn something about MVS or z, I don't do > >something else. > > I didn't mean that learning about MVS was a lot of work, but rather > that enhancing a large program like gcc was a lot of work. Learning > the MVS side of things is just the beginning.
Well, one way or another, the clue of the problem with MVS (as I see it) is the fact that mainframes fit area of my interests all right, but are not "my mainstream". So on the one hand, learning this stuff is big fun, on the other hand there are many more things that I would like to learn and time is always fixed. > >So far, I can explain with some confidence what HLASM abbreviation > >stands for (not sure about "M", still working on it). > > High Level ASseMbler. Oh, and I was thinking along the way of "Suspicious Machinations". What a spectacular fail. > >CFT - is it cross file transfer? > > Copious Free time. Of course, at one time I would have read CFT as > Cray ForTran ;-) A-ha! Ok, at least I have learned about interesting program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_File_Transfer > It's not specific to z or even IBM, but if you google for "jargon > file" you will find expansions of a lot of the alphabet soup used on > the Internet. Believe it or not, I look into jargon file occasionally. But I have long given up looking for words from mainframe world. Hit to miss ratio was too low, wikipedia fared much better for this job. I mean, this is not complaining, but I find mainframe world to be quite hermetic (in a sense connected to alchemy and hermetic science/art). This contributes to fun factor, but at the same time made me decide to slow my learning tempo. Of course things would not look so complicated if I had to sit on big ox 24/7, figuring how to do my stuff on it (i.e. I would learn everything very fast, just as people learn a new language by living in foreign culture all the time, rather than visiting it once every two weeks). But the 24/7 part (a.k.a. mainframe in my bedroom) is forbidden by excessive prices at the moment (I mean both prices of big bedroom and mainframes). And using MVS/380 for some of my "games" (like, recording and converting sound) is a bit impractical compared to doing the same stuff on Linux. In a near future, Linux will remain central part of my gaming, because learning mathematical modelling techniques or playing with some exotic languages (like Common Lisp or Haskell) is much easier on it. But if I have some time for this, I think it would be nice play to try doing at least few of those things on big hardware - or rather on Hercules. Playing with Hercules is much more attractive than trying to do anything useful with current fancy pocketable toys, which seem to be useless plastic bricks when compared to venerable box emulator. Yes I know bricks can be rooted/jailbroken. Somehow I doubt this is the right way to go, however. Without rooting, bricks are only good for terminals, AFAIK. Ok, this was to be just a short reply and now is turning into a rant. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
