Index to Mainframe Related Articles and Tutorials

You'll frequently hear people refer to mainframes as "dinosaurs" meaning to say that mainframes are goliaths and a thing of the past. The reality is that mainframes are dinosaurs in the sense that they are the 800 pound gorilla in a room otherwise populated by chimpanzees.

The bulk of the work done in my professional career has been in the IBM MVS mainframe environment. In that environment, I have written clists, JCL, REXX, SQL, and SAS programs and developed dialogs using ISPF. The material presented here was all created in the IBM MVS host environment.

REXX Tutorials Index

My REXX skills are rather basic as my use of the language is infrequent and typically only for short, simple applications. To reinforce my own skills, I have decided to undertake the writing of a series of REXX tutorials.

REXX HEX Math
A tutorial using a simple REXX program to perform basic math on two hexadecimal numbers.
REXX Find a String In a PDS
Source code for a REXX program to search a PDS (Partitioned Data Set) for a specified string

SAS Tutorials

While SAS is more than just a programming language, the tutorials here are limited to the subjects of the SAS language and SAS macro processing. If you were to call up the SAS Institute and ask them what SAS stands for, you would be told that it is not an acronym but a brand name. Many years ago if you asked this question, you would have been told that it stood for SAS Application Software, if I recall correctly. Now, this begs the question of what does the "SAS" in "SAS" stand for. Originally, "SAS" was an acronym for "Statistical Analysis System". However, as the SAS tool set has grown, the product has outgrown its original name.

The tutorials here are taken from presentations given at various SAS user conferences that date back to the late 1980's. At this time I have converted only a couple of these presentations into an HTML equivalent. As I find the time, I hope to convert all those which still have relevance.

SAS Tutorial: One PUT Does It All
This tutorial explains how to use a SAS macro to avoid repetitive coding of the same PUT statement.
Coding PUTs Without Coding PUTs
Creating multicolumn reports with SAS PUT statements can be a pain. This tutorial explains how to use SAS Macros to make your life easier in certain situations.

Other Mainframe Materials

The IBM EBCDIC Character Table
The table of the IBM EBCDIC character set.