RE: Microsoft Tries to Cozy Up to Mainframe, iSeries Users

["Steve Richter" <srichter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 6:50 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: Microsoft Tries to Cozy Up to Mainframe, iSeries Users


> From: Steve Richter
>
>
>> What can I say, James, that is my judgement after 5 years experience
>> coding in Windows. ( FWIW I give similar high praise to
>> programming on the as400 ) C# and VB are easy to learn,
>> the win32 api is very well done, C++ is a great language
>> and the visual studio editor is as extensible as you
>> want to make it.

> I may be confused here, but C++ is not a Microsoft language.

Not sure why you are confused. I will just say that C++ is very well
implemented in Windows.  And the new .NET/managed code extensions to C++ are
all microsoft innovations and very powerful.  They allow C++, traditionally
a heap and stack memory model based language, to work natively with the
garbage collection and reference memory model of .NET ( which MS stole from
Java! )  To get an idea of how important that is, consider how improved RPG
would be if it could natively instantiate and declare Java style classes.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/using/multimedia/newc/default.aspx

>C# is similar to Java with some of the C++ crap put back into it, like
>operator overloading and the goto operation.

C# is the MS language that works best with .NET.  If you are going to
compare Java to its MS equivalent, you have to compare Java to .NET.
Comparing Java to C# is the same as comparing Java to RPG while leaving out
any mention of ILE.  ILE is what makes RPG a very good language.  .NET does
the same for C#.

>VB is BASIC, and while it's a very nice BASIC, it's still BASIC.
>I have problems using BASIC for production programming, but that's me.

That is also missing the point.  What caused VB to take off as such a
popular language was COM, aka activex.  VB works very well with COM objects.
VB programmers can both create and use COM objects with a few mouse clicks.

>And the win32 API, well, I worked with Windows APIs for years, and
>I've never seen a worse API.  But that's just my judgment.
>Joe

Post an example, back up your judgement.

Here is a snippet of win32 api code that draws a rectangle and some text to
the client area of a window.  What is the Linux equivalent?
  HDC hdc ;
  hdc = ::GetDC( hWnd ) ;
  ::Rectangle( hdc, 20, 20, 300, 160 ) ;
  ::TextOut( hdc, 50, 60, L"AS400 and Windows.", 18 ) ;
  ::TextOut( hdc, 50, 80, L"Perfect together!", 17 ) ;
  ::ReleaseDC( hWnd, hdc ) ;

-Steve