Paradigm Corporation
2010 UNITE Conference

Presentation materials from the May 2010 UNITE Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

 

Introducing the UNITE Source Code Repository (SCR) (GE-4004)

Abstract

During the past two years, the UNITE board has explored ways to increase the sense of community among the Unisys user base. One of the ideas from that effort has been reactivation of a library of software contributed and maintained by the users themselves. The former Burroughs and Sperry user groups had such libraries in the past, but over time these collections have largely sunk into oblivion.

The rise of the open source movement has radically changed both the thinking behind and the facilities for software maintenance and distribution. The result is that we now have a much better environment within which to support user-maintained libraries of useful software. Over the past year, the speakers have explored the use of a free, open source project site, sourceforge.net, as a platform for maintaining a repository of user-contributed source code for Unisys systems.

The speakers will discuss the current organization and status of the SCR, their recommendations on how the SCR should be structured and administered, and the policy and practice issues they have identified which need further discussion and consensus from the community. They will also present a brief overview of the facilities offered by sourceforge.net, and a demonstration showing how to register on sourceforge, set up your own project, and have it associated with the Unite SCR.

The Unisys user base is only going to get out of its community what it chooses to put into it. The speakers will solicit both your comments and your participation towards making the SCR a valuable and viable resource for the community.

Presenter Paul Kimpel & Greg Schweizer
Slides Presentation slides as Adobe Acrobat .PDF (611 KB) updated 2010-06-04
 

Using – Really Using – COBOL-85 (MCP-4014)

Abstract

If you are like this speaker, you switched to the COBOL-85 compiler a long time ago, but kept coding in the same style you used for COBOL-74. This was so easy to do, COBOL-85 being a superset of COBOL-74, and retaining essentially all of the MCP extensions to the standard language. The super part of that superset is really super, however. COBOL-85 contains a rich collection of features that allow us to write cleaner, clearer, and more maintainable programs. 25 years after the introduction of those features, it's high time we all started using them.

The speaker will review the additions in COBOL-85 syntax that allow us to write programs in a much different way than with earlier COBOL dialects. This review will focus on the much-improved flow-of-control constructs, data declaration and manipulation enhancements, and the intrinsic functions. Based on these features, the speaker will discuss the new style of programming he has developed over the past few years, along with examples of that new style and how, for him, it has replaced some of the really ugly stuff you had to do in COBOL-74.

While this presentation is specifically oriented to COBOL-85 for the MCP, programmers for other platforms will find much of this presentation applicable to COBOL-85 in their environment.

Presenter Paul Kimpel
Slides & Notes Presentation slides and notes as Adobe Acrobat .PDF (247 KB)

 


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