The tips I regularly feature in this august publication deal with some aspect of source code syntax. Today I turn my attention to another part of the programming process. I want to talk about a work habit that you might find useful.

I would say that everyone who writes any type of source code at all knows the importance of comments, but that would be incorrect. I have followed (and written) too much code that was inadequately commented. Effective comments in source code serve as a great boon to the humans who must read or modify source code. As Ashley

I am thinking of writing a program that will read a source member of CL commands, interpreting them and running them dynamically one at a time. I can think of several situations in which such a utility would be more suitable than compiled CL programs. Before I re-invent the wheel, I want to know if IBM i already has something like that.

–Tom

Yes, there’s something like that. You can do this sort of thing with input spooling. I’ve only used input spooling on occasion, so I’m not an expert, but I can show you how it works.

Create a

For the second time in two years, my organization is participating in a multi-partition/multi-machine i5/OS V5R4 operating system upgrade to i 6.1. The second time around is interesting because I can build on lessons from last year’s upgrades. In the hope that it can help you with your V5R4 to 6.1 upgrades, here are some of my notes for planning the upgrades.

Deciding Between Upgrading To i 6.1 or i 7.1

With IBM dropping support for i5/OS V5R4 and the fact that Big Blue hasn’t released the i 8.x operating system yet, customers still have a choice whether to