Programming

COBOL turns 50

On Friday evening, I was browsing the Twitterverse and saw that I had missed some fun news. On Friday, September 18th, 2009, the COmmon Business Oriented Language (COBOL) turned 50. Though, earlier articles claimed that it's

iSociety fireside chat on CL programming

The iSociety, an online social group for IBM System i users and followers, will be holding a fireside chat later today. The group, which the user group COMMON started more than two years ago, has had a...

New RPG users: an oxymoron?

Like "jumbo shrimp" and "small fortune," one would probably think that "new RPG users" is an oxymoron. And if we expand that out more -- "new RPG users on the System i" -- well, that makes it seem more like one. But that may not be the case. The folks at

iSeries DevCon 2008: Learn something new about i

If you are noticing that the weather has turned from warm and sunny to a bit crisp and cool, maybe it's time to take a trip to the sunny state of Florida, and attend iSeries DevCon 2008 in Orlando...

RPG, Java, .Net — they’re all developers, right?

It seems that in more and more System i educational classes, there are growing numbers of Java and .Net developers sitting in aside the RPG developers. This according to a post over at iDevelop. As the post says,...

Coloring source code with SQL: Error encountered

We recently received a reader question in response to a reader-submitted tip on using SQL on System i to color source code and inline comments. On August 27, 2008, Don sent us this inquiry:

This is in...

RPG on the AS/400 — Old code meets new users

Today RPG is on my mind (perhaps because it was the focus of our Search400.com News newsletter today). And truly, RPG seems to be one of the most contentious issues with the i. For example, Pinnacle...

System i links for 7-10-08

• Context is Key: This nugget from midrange.com (it's been a while, David!) talks about always remembering the "why." If a program needs to be fixed, take a step back and ask why, and what it will accomplish.

EGL Cafe open: Are you ready for a new language?

Over a year after IBM's new Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) was launched, and following IBM's own iSeries EGL tutorial publication, the

On the INITIALIZE statement

The iSeries COBOL programmer explains how to use the INITIALIZE statement for the System i. This is an add-on to an earlier...