Flunk that!! Some things never seem to go away...

[Sameer Mukoo]

Why still use Cobol for batch if there is an alternative thats just as fast but requires 20% of the coding? Easytrieve has survived for decades already because of this. Time to re-discover what a lot of us already knew.

Great read from Marcel den Hartog on Easytrieve, link here

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Principal Product Manager
Broadcom
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[Ken Jenkins]

There are several reasons to still use COBOL,(I am a big advocate for Easytrieve)and use it everyday)., These are just of the enhancements I have requested,
1) It still does support all data types,i.e. COMP-1, COMP-2 and it was onlt in the last 5 years that it could handle 8 byte binary fields
2) Easytrieve can only handle 18 digits in a numeric field, COBOL can handle 31
3) The CASE statement is nowhere near as robust as EVALUATE
4) Easytrieve does not have parsing/stringing capability like STRING and UNSTRING. The CONCAT macro does not really compare
5) No referential modification ie FIELD(3:2), Yes you can get it done by adding an index to the filed or make it subscripted, :not as obvious or user friendly
5) Some system fields are too small like RECORD-COUNTER

The enhancements by me and  others seem to have been dropped or forgotten for years as there are no updates coming from the vendor. Easytrieve has not been updated in more than 7 years. No roadmaps even. I am still waiting to hear about the product survey from 2017.
I believe that the lack of members and activity in the community is because of the PERCEIVED APATHY about the vendor and Easytrieve. I would be that my ideas would be viewed hundreds to time and not a single vote good or bad . I joined CA communities on day one and I would that some of my ideas under review for years
At this point I don't know if all of my ideas and discussions migrated over because I can only see one page of discussions

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TSYS
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[Sameer Mukoo]

Hi Ken - Thanks for your reply. I am delighted to see someone respond back to my discussion too - that makes the two of us here.

On your enhancements they are still there just that IDEATION is moved as a separate section as we migrated to the new platform- you can check it out here - https://community.broadcom.com/ideation/allideas?Page=1&CategoryKeys=20ec7330-6561-4ac9-b3f0-0b43729926b5&StatusKeys=&Sort=MostRecent 

All your ideations for enhancements are there and I am currently reviewing all our backlog. I take your comments and understand that we haven't kept up to your expectations. I surely look to explore all that in our call scheduled for next week. 

Speak soon and points noted.

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Principal Product Manager
Broadcom
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[Ken Jenkins]

Another enhancement I have asked for is the ability to do exponential arithmetic FIELD-1 = FIELD-2 ** 5

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TSYS
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