On Sunday, 96/08/11, Harry Bush wrote to David Noon about
"RxQuerySysInfo(SysInfo.," as follows:

HB> BTW I have tried several times within approx a
HB> year but nobody is ready to sell me PL/I Personal and Toolkit 
HB> _at_the_ _current_CSD_level_... only some ancient crap, and  then
HB> you are on your own to collect fixes from the Net which are bigger
HB> then base version itself.   Wonder again if IBM really wants to sell
HB> any software or just does it for phun...

Hi Harry,

I've moved this to OS2PROG, since it isn't about REXX. I don't want to
incur the moderator's wrath.

The problem you are seeing is that IBM will not usually "slipstream"
maintenance into a program product. Once a base level has been set the
base product is kept there and any subsequent maintenance must be
applied by the customer. This has been a practice for many years; we
old mainframe systems programmers know "install buckets" all too well.

As you can see, this is a "corporate customer" mentality in IBM, not a
"retail product" one. MVS customers accept it, but OS/2 customers
mostly find it strange.

Buy your compiler (from a reseller, not IBM) and apply the maintenance
yourself. The toolkit maintenance is big because it contains LPEX, the
slick text editor. At least you only need to apply the latest CSD's,
since they contain all the preceding ones. The throughput of the IBM
ftp server is usually pretty good, but I'll bet it's slow at the
moment because OS/2 FP22 has just been released.

Also, if you are a Dev Con subscriber, e-mail teampli{at}vnet.ibm.com and
ask that the PL/I for OS/2 maintenance be put onto the Dev Con CD's.

Incidentally, I've just spent the last 2 days resurrecting some of my
mainframe code from the 1970's to run under OS/2. It reminded me why I
just _love_ the PL/I language. The only things I had to change were
some machine-specific bit strings for the mainframe FPU; these are now
hardware independent. Everything else would run unmodified. None of
the code is less than 18 years old. The punched cards I used for source
are getting a little tatty though. ... :-)

Regards

Dave


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