[yellowapple]

Yeah, a lot of AS/400 programming is actually pretty high-level (comparatively speaking). COBOL in general was meant to be accessible to end users (or at most power users) such that they could readily define business logic without having to resort to something like assembly or PL/I or what have you.

[larrik]

Yeah, these guys didn't really know COBOL either. They used RPG (an AS/400 exclusive language).

[rswail]

RPG is more like throwing random characters on a screen and seeing what happens.

Report Generator (RPG) is designed for an 80 column punch card. Put a F in column 6 to mean this, put a "C" to mean something else, match one of the 99 variables (named, intuitively 01 through 99) to make output happen.

I had the distinct displeasure in 1984 of trying to maintain a warehouse stock control system that some evil people had decided to implement in RPG. From memory, RPG only has the equivalent of single dimensioned arrays, so the location of items in the warehouse was an intersection of three arrays pointing to yet another array containing the SKUs.

It's designed to take one or more input files with defined columns in each row (card) and do some stuff (mostly subtotalling etc) and produce output.

Of course, it's been stretched beyond all recognition since it was introduced in 1959. It's literally 60 years old this year.

[larrik]

Yup, though we technically used RPGLE which was slightly better. It also had a "free text mode" which looked a bit more like a real language, but my coworkers were terrified of that.