Hacker News Reader

Comment by OneFamousGrouse | Hacker News Reader

> I do remember thinking it's odd that a line has exactly 80 characters and putting an asterisk in the 7th or 8th row means the line is a comment.

You should check out IBM RPG and its various iterations, it's a whole lot worse than that.

View on HN

As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.

But yes, you are correct.

There is RPGII code I wrote back in the 80's that is still in daily use today. Most of the people who know I wrote the code have passed on, so the support calls have stopped.

Partway through that particular gig, the IBM CE came by and installed COBOL. (For many years, I had ranted about how much I hated COBOL.) So I transitioned all the RPG code to COBOL and what a relief.

So I had to eat a little crow.

Shortly after my gig, they went full scale IBM and built an IT department, as opposed to just a system 34 in accounting.

So no support calls for me.

> As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.

One of my first gigs was working for a manager who loved RPG III. To the point where I was tasked with making a data collection interpreter using the same constructs RPG III is well-known for.

To this day, whenever someone mentions "RPG III" and what that project entailed, I think of the other one[0].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade

Reply on news.ycombinator.com