Express 4 release delivers Year 2000 safety for 3000s

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Express 4 release delivers Year 2000 safety for 3000s

HP rolls out latest MPE/iX version to comply with early customer deadlines

HP beat a year-end deadline for Year 2000 compliance at some of its customer sites by shipping MPE/iX 5.5 Express 4 software in late December. The software is being offered for HP 3000 customers who needed to certify all computer systems as Year 2000 safe before January 1, as well as any sites which want MPE/iX tools to help handle the millennium shift.

Express 4 contains all of the enhancements HP offered in Express 3, such as ODBCLink/SE, the new, faster b-tree indices for IMAGE, and support for 100-megabit LANs on HP 3000s. HP didn’t issue a formal Communicator for the release, but included articles on its new features with the software. The articles are also available over the Internet at http://jazz.external.hp.com/papers/Communicator.

This Web page also has a link to HP’s technical summary of the DDX bug in TurboIMAGE. HP didn’t include a fixed version of TurboIMAGE to repair the bug in Express 4. HP also has a Web page on its latest Year 2000 readiness updates for MPE/iX at www.hp.com/gsy/year2000/mpeix.html.



	Express 4 contains HP’s new intrinsics and variables to accommodate the century change on HP 3000s.

Customers were also reporting in late December that Express 4 was arriving without an installation manual or a separate subsystem tape. However, the software got to customer sites more than a week before the year-end 1997 deadline CSY had set for itself. Some HP 3000 customers face a policy from auditors and management which prevents them from running systems in 1998 which aren’t Year 2000-safe.

Express 4 contains HP’s new intrinsics and variables to accommodate the century change on HP 3000s. New date intrinsics to manipulate dates in various formats include HPDATECONVERT, HPDATEFORMAT, HPDATEDIFF, HPDATEOFFSET, HPDATEVALIDATE, HPCALENDAR and HPFMTCALENDAR.

The intrinsics have been available from CSY’s Jazz Web site since mid-1997, but the Express 4 release of them officially extends support for the enhancements. They support dates in the range from Year 1 through the end of the year 9999 and use the Gregorian calendar for all calculations.

HP has enhanced the STREAM, FILE, SETCLOCK, LISTSPF/SPOOLF and STORE commands in Express 4 to support both two- and four-digit years. The Express release also contains three new date formats. The first is an integer representation of the ISO 8601 date format, while the second is an ASCII representation of the same. HP extended its CALENDAR date format from 16- to 32-bits to create the third new format.

Two new Command Interpreter variables are added with Express 4. HPYYYY and HPSPLITYEAR are global CI variables. The first shows the current year with four digits, while the second shows the current century split year with an initial value of 50. The variables are used with the new date intrinsics to manipulate dates.

HP has also introduced new special date values with Express 4, representing unknown, invalid, never, needed and expired values. Special dates yield one of these output strings when the dates are passed to the HPDATEFORMAT intrinsic. HPDATEFORMAT has 17 different specification strings for formatting dates, including specific strings for century, calendar quarter, day of the year, and month of the year with leading zeros suppressed.

In addition to the Year 2000 tools in Express 4, the release also contains version A.04.16 of HP COBOL II/iX with enhancements for program size, bit manipulation and DISPLAY statements. HP has increased the compiled program size for COBOL II from more than 100,000 to well in excess of 200,000 lines of source code. The COBOL compiler has also been enhanced to permit index names to be used as operands in DISPLAY statements. It’s an ANSI extension to COBOL, and the compiler will warn if the feature is used. HP also enhanced the run-time library with procedures that simplify bit manipulation.

Express 4’s COBOL II run-time library includes several new routines for performing boolean operations. New AND, OR and XOR routines perform bitwise operations. NOT, UNPACK and PACK routines are also in the XL.PUB.SYS file, and all enhancements can be called from any program running in Native Mode.

HP also enhanced Inform/V and Allbase/BRW in the Express 4 release. Inform now supports Dictionary/3000 version A.00.03 enhancements, handling multiple items with the same primary name as an HP Inform group. Allbase/BRW received a Third Party Indexing fix for wildcard character selections and a repair of its spoolfile number management system.