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From: rmarks@bbking.PRC.Unisys.COM (richard marks)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: More fun stuff about Cobol
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Date: Wed, 26-Aug-87 12:14:01 EDT
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Posted: Wed Aug 26 12:14:01 1987
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In article <1490@cullvax.UUCP> drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley) writes:
>Cobol has been used for non-numerical work.  One early compiler (from
>Hopper's shop) was written in Cobol in the early 50s.

I once did a compiler (in the 80's) in Cobol.  We wanted it to be 100%
portable from our big 1100's to other manufacturer's boxes (blue ones).
In fact, Cobol and Fortran may be the most portable languages.

The compiler worked very well.  The data structures in Cobol are good.
I had to write one small assembler routine to get a block of memory and
return a pointer that Cobol used as an array index.  Implementation time,
execution time, etc were very good.  I would use Cobol again for such a
project and I've written several compilers in other languages.