Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor (Was: why ada is so unpopular ?)

[Leon Winslow <leon.winslow@notes.udayton.edu>]

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I'm interested in knowing why no one has mentioned that 40 years ago the
COBAL language included a statement to specify the machine and/or
operating system for the executable code.  If you wanted the program to
run on a UNIX box, you essentially entered UNIX at the head of the
program; if you wanted it to run on a Windows box you entered Windows.
The rest of the program remained the same.  (Its been a long time since
I used this feature so I don't remember the exact syntax.  Maybe someone
else knows?)

Of course, very few compilers actually implemented more than one
option.  If you wanted a different one, you usually needed a different
compiler.

The important feature however is that the rest of the program was
independent of the machine that would execute the program.  If COBAL
could implement this 40 years ago, why can't we try something similar?


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