• IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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      25 days ago

      That’s the fun thing about some of the older systems. Program names were limited to eight or ten characters so you had to get creative with naming within a library (basically the equal of a folder on AS/360 … AS/400 systems) if it got large.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        We have a few systems with data from the 90s that carried over the 8 character limit and a few older devs who are still in the habit of shortening names. Everyone once in a while I have to remind them to spell things out, they aren’t being charged by the letter!

        • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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          25 days ago

          Oh my goodness. I have a hard time getting folks to stop using QRPGLESRC and QCBLLESRC and start using the IFS so that we can put source in places like /home/devname/src. And don’t even get me started, we still have DDS defined files even after IBM deprecated them in favor of SQL DDL tables.

          The newest IBM i machines (formerly AS/400) even come with git but can’t use that because that’s too confusing for some still. And oh my goodness, RPGLE now comes with a builtin %upper() and %lower() but folks still using %xlate(), which doesn’t work with things like UTF-8. I can’t with some of the older devs at my place and I’m not exactly a spring chicken.

          All these tools IBM packs in to help people make more modern software and convert the older stuff to more modern implementations, but biggest problem I have is getting others to learn the new stuff and getting legal to be okay with major changes.