On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Tony Thigpen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sorry for the late post. Catching up on email. > > Ze'ev, > > I think the problem is what you ported. > > In my opinion, you were not "refreshing the mainframe", you were porting > code that goes against the mainframe mindset. > > On the mainframe, we want code that is maintainable by someone other > than the author. Code that is mostly clear about what it is doing. And > code that can be maintained by "normal" programmers (as opposed to the > "power" programs dedicated to R&D). PCRE violates all these principles. > > Just my opinion, but PCRE is about the worse thing about Pearl that ever > existed. I am not surprised that nobody wanted to download it. > > > Tony Thigpen > > sed -s 's/Pearl/PERL/g' #<grin/> I both agree and disagree with you. Or perhaps it is that I agree with you, but it saddens me. The nicest thing about PCRE is that it is a great implementation of regular expressions. However, regardless of their power, regular expressions are not a part of the OS/360 (and descendants) history. So "our" programmers are not comfortable with them. Therefore they tend to not approach problems with a regexp in mind. Also, how much business information on z/OS is kept in textual format? I would venture that a large majority is kept in DB2 tables. And what is not in DB2 (VSAM + sequential) most likely is not "textual" in that it will contain a lot of packed decimal (USAGE PACKED-DECIMAL) and maybe even binary (USAGE BINARY). Yes, the "good olde days of yore" are gone. In today's z/OS environment, there is nothing like the old Mellon mods and other modifications to the actual OS and major components. As much as Mr. Wheeler talks about FS being a bust, z/OS is much closer to the "black box" than it used to me. Companies today want "plug and play" employees, not experts. Experts cost too much. With "plug and play" employees, you can simply hire and fire at will. It simply is the way that it is. -- There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people! Genghis Khan Maranatha! <>< John McKown
