Bad Joke of the Month My therapist told me that I’m unable to express my emotions. I can’t say I’m surprised. The New %HIVAL and %LOVAL BIFs When I first saw the IBM announcement, I thought to myself “I’ve been using *HIVAL and *LOVAL for decades.” Then I looked more carefully, they are BIFs starting…
Bad Joke of the Month Q: How do you get a squirrel to like you?A: Act like you’re nuts. Is Y2K Back? Help for the 2039 Problem! Many of us remember working for years in the 1990s to find and fix anything that would cause a “Y2K problem.” These were the problems caused by using…
Bad Joke of the Month: A friend went Axe Throwing. I asked if she ever tried it blind folded. She replied, “No.” so I said “You don’t know what you’re missing!” %LEFT and %RIGHT Built-in Functions On October 10, IBM announced the latest RPG features. Among the new features were the %LEFT and %RIGHT built-in…
Bad Joke of the Month: Q: Why do programmers prefer dark mode?A: Because light attracts bugs. Environment Variables in Cobol? Why not? After posting last month’s blog post about environment variables, I was asked by a reader if it’s possible to use environment variables in a Cobol program. The answer? Yes, of course! You see,…
Joke of the Month A woman walks into a bar with a lizard on her shoulder, has a seat at a table and waits patiently for the waiter. When the waiter arrives, he says “Welcome! What an interesting pet! What is his name?” The woman responds “Tiny.” The waiter, surprised, says “That’s an unusual name…
Are you taking advantage of the built-in functions offered in the CL programming language? I was helping a colleague write a CL program recently, and I discovered that he didn’t know about all of the amazing functions IBM has added to CL over the past few years!