> I've never had occasion to try write OO programs on the mainframe. > to me it seems that the chief value of classes and class methods is a > way of organizing my subroutines and functions and limiting their > scope to particular uses which seems to me would be useful in some > mainframe programs
> I gather some OO languages are available to OMVS users here Let me jump in here with a very personal note and say I *have* written a very successful* mainframe program in a totally OO paradigm. So yes, OO is totally relevant to mainframe software. To me, yes, it is a method of organization of data and subroutines. It is a totally different way of thinking about things. Let me see if I can express this. You have a program. You want to add some functionality to it. Rather than thinking separately "I will need some new data fields" and "I will need some new subroutines" instead you think "I will need a 'package' of new data fields and subroutines that operate on those fields." It is a way of organizing the effort that I found to work extremely well for me. I cannot picture writing a large program any other way: not as a hodgepodge of fields and subroutines, but rather as a collection of smallish 'packages' of data and their attendant subroutines. Utterly industry-standard C++ is available for developing both "legacy" and UNIX programs on z/OS. The program I refer to above is run with JCL as an STC; nothing external about it screams "C" or "OO" or "OMVS." *Licensed by quite a few "name" companies and then acquired by a big-name software company for fairly big bucks. Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
