Status of the IBM RPG II product in z/OSProduct Status in z/OSAs of January 2009, the OS/VS RPG II product (5740-RG1) V1R1M0 is fully supported by IBM and available with their ServerPac, CBPDO and SoftwareXcel offerings. |
For over 10 years, rumors about OS/VS RPG II have circulated around the
world, often forecasting an about-to-happen disappearance of the product. These
rumors were often expressed by IBM/IGS employees in various parts of the world.
Having said that, it is true that references to OS/VS RPG II on the IBM software Web site are rare. In particular, OS/VS RPG II is not listed on the Traditional Programming Languages and Software Support Lifecycle pages.
There is no indication that IBM will drop support for OS/VS RPG II in the future, as they are well aware of their customers who run large inventories of RPG II programs in OS/390 and z/OS and have no alternative to the product. Furthermore, many VSE customers use RPG II and the OS/VS RPG II compiler is required for those which migrate to z/OS.
OS/VS RPG II (5740-RG1) was announced by IBM in 1981. Prior to that announcement, RPG II was only available in DOS/VS (5746-RG1) which was announced in 1977. Until 1982, IBM OS/VS customers who needed RPG II had to use a compatible compiler developed by an independent software vendor.
The OS/VS RPG II product was a quick-and-dirty port of the DOS/VS RPG II product (5746-RG1), as attested by the presence of CSECTs called IJSYSIN, IJSYSLS, IJSYSPH, IJSYS01, IJSYS02, IJLSTWK and IJPCHWK. This is obvious if you look at the link-edit maps of the RPGII and RPGIAUTO load-modules which were produced with the LINKMAP product and are available here.
After it became available in 1982, OS/VS RPG II rapidly established itself as the de-facto standard RPG II compiler in MVS and displaced its older non-IBM competitors which soon disappeared.
Since its introduction, OS/VS RPG II has been a largely functionally-stabilised product which has received no significant functional enhancement. In particular, OS/VS RPG II never received support for 4-digit years, as was the case for its ancestor, DOS/VS RPG II. Defect support, however, was always available and a number of PTFs were issued to correct bugs.
One annoying problem I experienced in 1983 on MVS was that RPG II programs trying to read an empty VSAM data set would terminate with a U1299 abend. I designed a complicated procedure which included UPSI switches, control cards, and a front-end module to avoid the abends for a particular customer converting from DOS/VSE. Some years later, I noticed that the RPG II run-time module that handles VSAM OPENs had been updated to avoid the abend, as in DOS/VSE.
The OS/VS RPG II products includes the RPG II compiler itself, the Auto-Report pre-compiler, and the run-time library. OS/VS RPG II is not LE-compliant, which may cause some issues when OS/VS RPG II programs CALL sub-programs written in COBOL or PL/I.
OS/ VS RPG II V1R1M0 is compatible with DOS/VS RPG II 1.3, except for year 2000 enhancements such as UDATE4. The RPG II LCP of the Prism Conversion System product (Prism-CS) performs all the source code changes that are necessary to ensure that DOS/VS RPG II programs compile, link-edit and execute successfully in the MVS/ESA, OS/390 and z/OS environments.
| GC33-6029-03 | DOS/VS RPG II Specifications |
| SC33-6031-03 | DOS/VS RPG II System Library |
| SC33-6032-02 | DOS/VS RPG II Installation Reference |
| SC33-6033-01 | DOS/VS RPG II Messages |
| SC33-6034-01 | DOS/VS RPG II Auto Report Manual |
| SC33-6074-00 | DOS/VS RPG II User's Guide |
| GC33-6120-01 | DOS/VS RPG II OS/VS RPG II General Information (Current Release) |
| SC33-6122-00 | OS/VS RPG II Installation Reference |
| SC33-6128-00 | OS/VS RPG II Addendum to DOS/VS RPG II Auto Report |
| SC33-6130-00 | OS/VS RPG II Addendum to DOS/VS RPG II Messages |
| GC33-6131-01 | OS/VS RPG II Program Summary |
| GC33-7098-00 | OS/VS RPG II LPS |
In February 1991, IBM announced SAA RPG/370 (5688-127) as a future replacement for OS/VS RPG II. The product was withdrawn from marketing in October 1993, and program services were discontinued in June 1995. The announcement letters are here
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