Been out of the game for a long time..
Does IBM not distribute some version of HACS .. I worked on in the 90's ? took
over from Aad Van Tol .. IBM Uithoorn? An amazing programmer and top guy!
From: George Henke/NYLIC
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 11:41 PM
To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
Subject: Re: Mandatory ESMs?
z/VM has LE ported over from z/OS.
So things cannot be all that bad in the world of CMS compilers.
"I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head"
Oscar Hammerstein
David Boyes <dbo...@sinenomine.net>
Sent by: The IBM z/VM Operating System <IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU>
12/10/2010 05:34 PM Please respond to
The IBM z/VM Operating System <IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU>
To IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU
cc
Subject Re: Mandatory ESMs?
> GCC for CMS [snip]
Building a non-trivial program that involves existing libraries or code that
must access things like CSL services is pretty hard to do with the CMS GCC
port. It's a good tool for writing apps totally from scratch, but it's not
something yet that I would rely on for really large mission-critical
applications. The generated code is still very conservative in the
instructions it uses and what machine functions it can/does exploit, to it's
detriment.
I'm concerned that there's no Enterprise COBOL, no more development on FORTRAN,
no up to date PL/1… etc, etc. The IBM C/C++ compiler is still maintained and
current, but only because it's necessary for CP development. You can't order
CMS VSAM any longer, so there's no direct access file capability from the old
compilers without directly interfacing to assembler yourself. Nothing's been
touched in SQL/DS for VM for ages now. TSM is gone. 2/3 of the function of
DFSMS/VM is pretty much gutted in terms of usability or functionality. ISPF/VM
is ancient, and pretty much no longer maintained in any real sense (a lot has
happened in ISPF since 3.2). No Java since 1.3 (although that's no real loss,
IMHO). APL2 is frozen in time. Pascal is frozen in time (and only still exists
to service the bits of the VM TCP stack that aren't in C or assembler). Ditto
RXSQL. Ditto Kerberos (the shipped K4 is nothing you'd want to build new apps
on). Interactive Debugger? DMS/CMS? All pretty much in a zombie state. OpenVM?
Not much to see there either — although we finally have some reason for BFS to
exist with the new SSL server (not that it's all that much fun to use).
You're pretty much left with assembler, C, C++, XEDIT, REXX and CMS Pipelines
as the supported application development languages on CMS.
That's a pretty powerful set of tooling by itself, but if you're trying to
preflight applications and do development in the CMS world that is intended for
other places and other uses, that's not much. 3 out of 6 aren't widely portable
outside VM at all, and the other 3 are restricted to a small number of
interfaces with a tiny subset of their function on other platforms.
The writing is pretty much on the wall. I know the reason why, but it's still
sad.
-- db
