Hi Tom,
Not new/difficult, but, must be used appropriately or it can cause
performance issues.
When I worked at SIAC (NYSE) 2004-2010, one of the last mainframe
activities I did was to look into why 6 Batch Jobs (run nightly) took
over the machine to the point that TSO response time was painfully slow
(after 1st period). The original programmer decided to use UNSTRING to
build CSV Data out of records from a KSDS. On a hunch, I rewrote the
UNSTRING call in Assembler. The run times of these 6 (similar) Jobs went
from 6 hours to just over a half hour.
Regards,
David
On 2024-03-15 16:55, Tom Harper wrote:
I used STRING / UNSTRING back in the early 1970s it’s not new nor difficult.
Unbelievable.
Tom Harper
Phoenix Software International
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 15, 2024, at 4:20 PM, Farley, Peter
<0000031df298a9da-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
+1 from me on continuing to learn the tools of our profession. I use STRING
and UNSTRING where they make sense, and I am still learning new things about
their use every now and then. Life-long learning is the only path to happiness
and success.
I got the same ridiculous pushback from a senior manager one time on the use of
“sophisticated” SORT verbs like JOIN because “. . . no one but you will know
how to fix it when it breaks . . . let someone do it in COBOL instead . . .”.
Peter
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Bob
Bridges
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 12:38 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Learning one's tools
To rant on a related subject, I once worked at a company that instituted code reviews; a
new program would be gone over by a half-dozen coworkers to be sure it adhered to local
standards. This sort of thing is always painful to the coder, and nevertheless (I admit
reluctantly) can have considerable value if done right. One problem I had with it,
though, is that the standards we created for ourselves admitted that there are times when
exceptions should be made for special cases, and yet when those cases arose no exceptions
were ever allowed; the team invariably flinched, leaned back in their seats and said
"no, that's not according to our standards".
One particular example always rankled: Whenever someone felt the need to use a
STRING or UNSTRING command (I should have said we were COBOL developers), the
team always struck it down on the grounds that STRING and UNSTRING are unusual
commands and some COBOL coders would be unfamiliar with it. My contention here
is that that's absolutely true, and it's the job of the COBOL coder to ~learn~
the STRING and UNSTRING statements, as tools of his profession. I never
persuaded anyone to that view, though.
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