Ed Gould asks: >What is the cost benefit to do the conversion? I guess you missed what I wrote about improved code efficiency. Another big benefit for many/most shops is significant constraint relief for each and every data division (~16-fold increase) and data item (~8-fold increase). IBM's announcement letter for Enterprise COBOL 5.1 has more information on benefits:
http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/4/897/ENUS213-144/ENUS213-144.PDF By the way, isn't IBM-MAIN the forum where, for years, I've/we've slogged through complaints (hundreds?) about the COBOL compiler not taking advantage of newer, more efficient zEnterprise instructions? Enterprise COBOL 5.1 does, all the way up to and including zEC12/zBC12 instruction sets as you wish. What's XY% improvement in code efficiency worth? "More than zero, probably much more than zero" is the rational answer. Are XY% efficiency improvement (more to come), immediate constraint relief, a clear technical option to 64-bit, and other benefits worth a PDSE prerequisite, a prerequisite which many customers have already satisfied? That was the technical choice IBM faced together with customers through a lot of requirements gathering and a long development and testing process (including customer programs) for the new compiler. Did IBM make the right decision, or should IBM not have improved and advanced COBOL? That really was the choice. I really, really think IBM made the right call here for customers. So let's figure out how to get to PDSEs as quickly, easily, and cost-effectively as possible with minimum risk. Some posters in this thread have some good ideas. IBM also took the opportunity to provide a new 90-day trial program so that you can technically validate your particular business cases with greater precision. Another question: Why is it that z/OS customers running Java have had no particular problems putting their Java code in PDSEs for so many years, running lots of mission-critical batch and online applications? What makes them different? "Not much" is the honest answer, isn't it? They write code, they test it, they deploy it, and they run it, successfully. Or, if "not much" is not the answer, we really don't like the other answer (John Gilmore's?), do we? I agree with Tom Marchant by the way. All operating systems bootstrap, and all of them must. Mac OS X 10.7, for example, introduced so-called "full disk encryption" (FileVault 2). That's nice, except it's not "full": Macs still need a readable (i.e. unencrypted) skinny boot partition to get everything going. Maybe someday Apple will shove that unencrypted boot partition completely into firmware, but no matter where it comes from it's still the same boot sequence. If there's a useful reason PDSEs (or DB2 as another example) ought to be available earlier in the z/OS IPL sequence, let IBM know through the appropriate channels. Enterprise COBOL 5.1 isn't one of those reasons as far as I can see. My views are my own here. My views sometimes change upon consideration of new evidence. They are not necessarily those of my employer or my dentist. If I happen not to repeat this reminder, it still applies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
