Talk:Easytrieve

A large part of the article claims similarities between Easytrieve and COBOL. I was a COBOL programmer who selected EasyT as the Corp. Reporting Tool (around 1981). I chose it because it was not like COBOL. There are trivial similarities - they both spell "ADD" the same way! But the structure and approach are quite dissimilar. In Cob you create the program flow. In EasyT (at a basic level) the flow is implicit; you are simply creating input / report specifications. --Kcrossle (talk)

I am a cobol and Easytrieve application developer and I totally agree with the editor - Kcrossle that COBOL and easytrieve are not very similar except they share the spellings for few keywords - but they are more generic points and not worth mentioning that as a title heading - So I suggest renaming the title "Similarity to Cobol" and alter the section. Let me try. Being said that would be happy to hear other perspctives - Karthik Sripal (talk) 19:58, 10 September 2013 (UTC)Reply

I'm a retired programmer analyst who used Eastrieve Plus for many years in a COBOL mainframe environment. I agree whole heartedly with the forgoing comments that E.P. had little or no similarity to COBOL either in syntax, style or philosophy. Besides being a great report generation tool (COBOL never did get a good Report Writer), it's sparse and elegant syntax could also be used for general purpose file manipulation and management. It was detested by the old traditional mainframe COBOL programmers - many of whom had used the earlier Pansophic products, which did have some nasty gotcha bugs lurking to waylay the unwary, and after experiencing some of these, they wrote the product off. The later CA versions of the product fixed all that, and made it a truly reliable product. EP was fully compatible with COBOL data structures and field definitions like COMP-3, reading and writing packed fields was no sweat. A COBOL report might take a week for the "shop" to produce. A skilled EP programmer crank out the same report in day - and then create multiple versions of the same with minimal time and overhead, a skill that endeared the analyst programmer to upper management. COBOL was SUPPOSED to be as easy to read as plain English, but it never really was, largely because of the signal to noise ratio - all that formatting and unnecessary syntax meant one had a difficult time seeing the forest for the trees! EP on the other hand was sparse and elegant. Once you became familiar with it's simple syntax and operators it was VERY easy to understand. The stacked JOB architecture lent itself to modular and reusable program development - another trick in the EP programmer's arsenal... Too bad it's still a proprietary language. I could see using the syntax and structure to create a truly universal report/file manipulation program!

Yes! for that reason I ran away from COBOL. I learned it to approve an exam and did my best effort to forget it after I approved it with a 10/10 grade, thanks that previously I learned a more concise structured Pascal like pseudo-code that allows one to reason with less extra elements.

Dijkstra has hated by many programmers when he said that (in more or less words) "COBOL cripple the mind, its teaching should be considered a criminal offence!", I agree with him, he also criticized the Object Oriented Programming languages, for the same reason, they add unnecessary complexity to problem solving.

It was a very naive assumption from the COBOL creators that all that verbosity could made a self documented program.

COBOL designers were more concerned to document who ordered the program, who modified it, and all that bureaucratic stuff instead to develop a neater language to express (business) procedures.

One good thing in COBOL is that it has records and unions. Although the late were introduced to deal with the short width of punched cards (80 columns) having a way to split a long record in several cards.

But it can be used to implement variant records, in a similar way that is done in Pascal.They can be implemented in COBOL REDEFINEing records (or RENAMEing, I don't remember well).

Another key feature was that COBOL was designed for batch processing of files as collections of records.

AWK was also designed for batch processing in the Unix programming environment. An operating system designed to interconnect programs as coroutines using pipes, a much more elegant (parsimonious and expressive) solution to batch processing, now not proprietary.

I also remember that RPG (Report Program Generator) was another language in the business environment. I never used that language but heard that it was like the spreadsheets of that time.

I don't know Easytrieve, (I came here to learn what it was), but I think that it can be compared with RPG and maybe with AWK. Am I right?

Can anyone write a section on that, please? At the time of writing this comment, the article only has an incomplete example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.124.220.83 (talk) 04:43, 17 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

Easytrieve could be included in additional catagories - "Reporting Languages" (new), "Scripting Languages" (existing), "Mainframe Languages" or "Mainframe Tools".

I remember other reporting languages like it:

QuickJob ...
- QuickJob
- Dyle-80
- Dylacor
- Vision Report
CA-EARL
WAPSUT
RPG

Bamx86 (talk) 17:11, 23 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

According to "IEEE annals of the history of computing" (available in Google Books), Easytrieve was installed in over 10,000 IBM mainframe installations when Pansophic (the company that developed it) was sold to C/A in 1991 for $300 million. Pansophic also had a widely deployed software revision management tool called Panvalet.

Eastrieve was originally called Pro/Grammer (pro/grammar?) back around 1979. There is extensive coverage of the product in the 1980s available in Google Books. Just because it doesn't run on Unix doesn't mean it isn't notable...69.37.68.72 (talk) 09:59, 29 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Easytrieve (now called Easytrieve Classic) originates from 1969 and was no more than a (RPG-type) report generator, though with tricks one was able to do some file copy operations. In 1979 Pansophic introduced a 4th generation language and called in Pro/grammar, but it did not work out. They then decided to send a reel with the product to all users of the classic version. Free to try. They called it Easytrieve Plus. One day in 1980 someone from a big softwarehouse, employed for one of our projects, told me and I was able to retrace the tape, had it installed and within 3 years our university had changed from Classic to Plus. In 1990 Pansophic released Easytrieve Plus Workstation for Dos, of which I keep a (still operational) version. It had Screens, and was interpreted and each pc needed at least the runtime system. A separate module (Natural Language) imported file definitions from Easytrieve Plus and was able to generate reports using normal English phrases with a builtin dictionary to understand commonly used words and interactively defining each new phrase or term. Easytrieve Plus Workstation was followed (april 1992) by Ca-Easytrieve Plus Pc, a compiler version, that produced .exe's. In 1994 Dick Burggraaf (CA Nieuwegein) created a first debugger for this package. In 1994 Easytrieve Online was released, in January for MVS in April for VSE (operating system), running under CICS. It worked, was as easy to program as preceeding Easytrieve products, but I remember that compiling in VSE took 30 to 45 minutes for any normal sized program, creating not few problems when we went in production with our first project, as the management system obbliged recompile. Ambusy (talk) 09:26, 1 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

@Ravenswing: I undid your turning this page into a redirect because I think this package is quite notable. It was a major mainframe software product in the 1970s and 1980s. There are going to be lots of sources discussing it, but they may be difficult to track down, because most of them will be from that time period (when it had mainstream popularity in enterprise computing.) Mr248 (talk) 23:49, 27 February 2021 (UTC)Reply