RPF: Rob's Programming Facility

Introduction

RPF is a software product, which runs on a S/370, S/390 and z/Series mainframes. It is available in TSO under the operating systems MVS, MVS/XA, MVS/ESA, OS/390 and z/OS. 
RPF is intended to be used by experienced people, who have a good knowledge of IBM mainframes and mainframe operating systems. 
RPF is for use with 24-bit and 31-bit MVS operating systems (MVS 3.7 and above). RPF is written in S/370 assembler (IFOX00), but can be translated with Assembler-H (IEV90) or HL-Assembler (ASMA90).

Roots of RPF

RPF was developed because in the 1980's we did not have a "state of the art" editor in MVS. IBM has a beautiful editor in TSO called ISPF. My employer did not choose to pay for ISPF because the standard editor was Roscoe. ISPF was too expensive and TSO was not used very much in those days.

When I started to work at this employer I had a TSO background for many years. So I felt that I needed a fullscreen editor in TSO and MVS. That was the reason to develop an editor by myself. I wrote the fullscreen editor (RPF) in the evening hours on my employer's computer. My employer permitted me to use the computer for this project. 
After months of development and programming, the first prototype of RPF was available for testing. Many collegues tested RPF and reported bugs and suggestions to me. Finally RPF became available for production. For many years we worked with RPF continued to improve it in subsequent releases. 
In 1984 MVS and TSO became so common that my employer decides to pay for IBM's ISPF product. Until the 1990's we used both RPF and ISPF. After a few years ISPF had replaced RPF and RPF was not used anymore. At that time I decided to stop the development of RPF.

Browse on a large screen with 62 lines and 160 columns

In the famous year 2000, the S/370 and S/390 emulator Hercules became available. With Hercules you are able to run MVS and its successors on a PC platform. The first version of Hercules ran only in Linux. Later, the Windows version became available. 
Suddenly I and many other "Herculeans" had the availability of a mainframe on our own PC's. 
IBM decided to make MVS 3.8J available for common use, so you don't need to pay license fees anymore for the base MVS. However ISPF was not available for public domain use, because ISPF is still used and is a copyrighted product. 
MVS/TSO without a full-screen editor is not a very good option, so I decided to make RPF available to Hercules users running MVS on their personal computers. Desiring to make a full-screen editor available for myself and these users, I restarted development of RPF.

Functions of RPF

RPF consists of 1 version which runs on all MVS like platforms (MVS38J, MVS380, MVS/XA, MVS/ESA, OS/390 and z/OS). In MVS/XA and above and MVS/380, RPF uses extended addressing to run in 31 bit mode.
RPF is started in TSO as a command processor. After logon to TSO, the command "RPF" is sufficient to have all the functions of RPF available to you. 
The functions of RPF are:

• Edit of card-image records l like parameter decks and source-code of programs like PL/1, Cobol, Fortran and last but not least Assembler.
• Edit other data sets or members with fixed or variable records up to 255 bytes.
• Browse/View files and members of Partitioned Datasets (PDS) under MVS.
• Browse/View files with undefined records like LOAD modules.
• Compile (assemble) of Assembler source code and to link-edit the code to executable programs.
• Creation (allocation) of MVS data sets and Delete of MVS data sets.
• List the Volume Table Of Contents (VTOC) of DASD volumes. Also you can browse, edit, delete, uncatalog, catalog and compress (PDS only) datasets in a "dataset selection list"
• Execute TSO commands.
• Display, requeue, print and delete JOB output.
• Edit, Browse of Librarian modules. Librarian is a product of Computer Associates (Broadcom). Librarian is not a part of RPF. Only the free-to-distribute FAIR routines of Librarian are used.
• Edit, Browse, print and delete ARCHIVER items. ARCHIVER can be dowloaded from www.cbttape.org file 147
• Move and Copy of PDS members.
• Reset and Delete ISPF statistics.
• Search data sets for strings of data.

Installation of RPF

RPF is distributed as seven unloaded partitioned datasets, that can be received with e.g. IND$FILE on your 3270 emulated terminal.
The zip files containing the RPF unloaded PDS's and the RPF User's Guide can be downloaded in the table below.

Release 1.9.9 available

The updates of this release are:

• EDIT: Improvents in CUT command and prompt if AUTOSAVE=N;
• BROWSE: All non-VSAM data sets can be browsed and vv.mm in header if available;
• Achiver interface: many improvements and ABEND0C4 fixed;
• Length of messages increased from 22 to 25 characters;
• Many minor improvements and bugfixes:

RPF 1.9.9 will replace older releases of RPF.

RPF 1.9.9 has been tested on MVS38J, MVS380 and z/OS.

RPF 1.9.9 is distributed as 9 zipped XMI files to make the installation easier. Install these files with Hercules DASDLOAD, with RECV370 or with TSO RECEIVE.

Click here for an example of an RECV370 job. Alternatively you can run the TSO RECEIVE command after upload with PC-3270 File Transfer (IND$FILE).

Current releases

Release notes

You can also find RPF on the CBT-tape website (file 415). Click on the icon below to visit cbttape.org. De latest version is on the UPDATES page on cbttape.org.

Dowload and unzip the file and transfer the file with IND$FILE to your mainframe host. Read member @FILE415 to install the RPF load library.

A usermod to install Addressing mode 31 capabilities in MVS38J

Paul Edwards and Gerhard Postpischil have written a SVC 120 (GETMAIN) interface to support a basic set of adressing mode 31 capabilities in MVS38J. This feature is called MVS380. With this feature RPF can have up to 1 million workspace lines for editing large data sets.

I have written an SMP4 usermod to install this feature. This usermod needs Greg Price's usermod ZP60033. This usermod add the LOC operand in GETMAIN.

Click on the button below to download the MVS380 usermod.

Download MVS380 usermod