Death By CL

I've just spent a month over the last 4 days attending an IBM (AS400) "CL" programming course in Northampton. For those of you not in the know, "CL" stands for "Control Language" and is the IBM equivalent of DOS batch files with a bit of database file handling thrown in for good measure. It's about 100 years old and is the equivalent of your local hospital getting tips from Florence Nightingale.

The tutor was surprisingly enthusiastic about it all. "I'm going to teach you all about DO-WHILE loops and SUBROUTINES", she gushed. Erm, I vaguely remember learning about them in 1975 and emulating them in assembler code in 1977.

"What's your job?" she asked.
"I'm a business analyst currently doing a web-based program using Visual Studio and ASP.NET, onto a SQL Server database".

There was a slight pause and her eyes widened slightly - "Oh, never mind. Anyway." she continued "this is all new to version 5.3 of the AS400 operating system, prior to that it you only had IF THEN GOTO structures."

We all went on to discover how marvellous black and green character based screens are, using line based editors.

Towards the end of the course she polled the class. "What version of the operating system are you all on? Gary?"

"6 point something"
"Excellent!"

"Pete?"
"5.2 I think."

"Ah."

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