VMS features in PH

[Chris Sharman]

Since it would appear the future of the VMS-specific Powerhouse enhancements is
under discussion, it would seem a good time for a review of what they are, and
for a straw poll of their value. I've had a look through the handbook to see
what the specifics are.

Apologies to non-VMS people for filling your mailbox with mainly irrelevance,
although you may have views on timestamps at least (see end).

First the good news:
CHAR and VARCHAR items may be up to 32K on other platforms, rather than the
paltry 2K available to us on VMS at present.
I don't know what the FILE OCCURS & CACHE limits are on other platforms (a
miserable 255 on VMS - it can only be better elsewhere).
There's a BACKWARDS file retrieval option on other platforms: RMS has supported
this (rms$v_reverse I think) since about VMS 7.0, but PH hasn't given us
access.
Going to common code would presumably give us these enhancements.

The bad news:
1) The PHD dictionary maint feature. Lots of correspondence already here.
2) Mailboxes are no longer supported. These are obviously closely akin to pipes.
3) Commandstatus/severity functions.
4) Office functions (All-in-1).
5) Systemvalue functionality: VMS has logicals & symbols. Other platforms don't
	appear to offer a choice of systemvalue type (or table).
6) Reverse only exists in Quick.
7) Set job & various print qualifiers to set report.
8) Timestamp datatype & functions.

If I've missed anything please post it.

My views:
Reliability: we should probably expect to suffer slightly in the short term,
but longer term we'll hopefully get more development resource & more bugs fixed.

1) I want PHD.
2) I occasionally use mailboxes for output, & can probably workaround this.
   	I don't see how to replace input mailbox functionality in PH, but we
	don't use it here.
3) Commandstatus/severity. Don't use this. The builtin commandok could probably
	cover most use of this (provided it tests for odd, not zero, contrary
	to the documentation).
4) Office. Don't use this at all.
5) Job logicals would probably cover most needs, but this change would be a lot
	of work: we make extensive use of systemvalues to parameterise reports,
	and to display to users which actual file they're using, when it's
	controlled by logical names.
6) Reverse. We use this a bit in Quiz for string manipulation. If the goal is
	homogenisation, it would seem reasonable to put it in Quiz & QTP
	as well as Quick.
7) Set job etc. Don't use this at all.
8) Timestamps. Use this lots, but I don't like it now. This seems like an
	opportunity for Cognos to do it better:

I'd like a timestamp datatype which I can enter, display, find, choose by in
full (ie time fields as well as date fields). This needs format extending, and
some sort of dateconvert (cf nconvert) to allow a date range to include hours &
minutes etc, rather than decimals. For find to be useful, generic needs
extending from character fields to date fields too (or all fields): when you
find a record you typically don't know the exact centisecond of the timestamp.

I don't care about delta times, so IBASEDATE is effectively the same as VMSdate
(although the limits in the docs are wrong I think, the 64 bit format provides
for +/-30k years).

I'd like a timestamp function which returns a datatype date, so I can do
comparisons & get the right answer (see the last section of 710G release
notes).

It would be nice to have a formatdate function like the new formatnumber, so
that I can convert dates to ascii nicely for use other than in fields.

Regards,
Chris Sharman
______________________________________________________________________
Chris Sharman			Chris.Sharman@CCAgroup.co.uk
CCA Stationery Ltd, Eastway, Fulwood, Preston, Lancashire, PR2 9WS.
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