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From: "David W. Hodgins" <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Rewriting SSA. Is This A Chance For GNU/Linux?
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2025 10:53:18 -0400
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On Thu, 03 Apr 2025 03:28:07 -0400, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 03 Apr 2025 02:00:30 -0400, David W. Hodgins wrote:
>
>> The data is in EBCDIC, not ASCII. Sequential files can be fixed or
>> variable length. For fixed, the length of each record is specified in
>> the file declaration, while for variable, the length is in the first
>> bytes of each record. There is no character or combination of characters
>> used to represent the end of a record.
>
> I don't see any of that to be a problem. Until quite recently a mid-
> western US state's criminal justice system used EBCDIC and the IBM
> protocol where the record lengths are specified in a known size hearer.
> When I wrote the interface it converted from ASCII to EBCDIC and vice
> versa on the fly. Lookup tables were necessary. I would hope all the data
> uses the same code page.
>
> All this is business as usual when dealing with data. Again hopefully they
> have maintained uniformity over the decades and it is not the situation of
> the Obamacare roll-out that had to deal with many companies and agencies
> that march to their own drummer.

The conversion is easy once you have the data and fully understand the relationship
between the various files and databases.

Converting the use forward and reverse chile pointers in an IMS hierarchical database
to the equivalent in DB2 databases can be done, provided the person doing the
conversion understands the purpose and use of the pointers.

Some of the PL/1 programs I worked on used 15 dimensional tables (the max allowed
in PL/1).

Learning the data structures used, both in databases and within programs takes time.
There are Panvalet (and other) file storage systems in addition to the databases and
"regular files".

There are a lot of parts developed over decades that all have to keep working in
conjunction with each other.

Regards, Dave Hodgins