Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics (COBOL Popularity)

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Richard Riehle wrote:

> "I R T" <rambam@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
> news:oenv7hhc.fsf@pop-server.bigpond.net.au...
> 
>>Association with the military was the kiss of death as far
>>as many developers were concerned.
>>
>>COBOL also had the benefit of backing by IBM.
> 
...
> IBM wanted COBOL gone.  The only reason it kept it alive
> was to satisfy RFP requirements from the DoD.  In time, COBOL
> became the dominant language for business data processing, even
> though IBM continued to insist on the superiority of PL/I.
...
> Richard Riehle

One of the areas that COBOL was very successful in (and still),
is providing the necessary facilities to perform business
functions. While it may seem trivial, the need to format
numeric values (particularly monetary values) in a picture
format is so prevalent, that it becomes a major pain to
use other languages that don't conveniently provide this.
Imagine trying to report picture clauses in C# or Java?

Sure, everyone can write their own objects/routines to do
this, but many business shops have people that are not
as motivated or organized. The need is so basic, that
people expect the platform to provide this.

Ada provides for this, but IIRC it is limited to only
decimal types (which is a pain). It would
be nice to see more support for this in Ada, to make
easy to do from floating point or other
numeric types (even integers).

Of course, I am sure there were many other factors that
played into the popular use of COBOL besides this. I've
forgotten any COBOL I once knew, but I seem to remember
that having builtin support of Indexed files etc. to be
a great asset to business.

PL/I had a number of whizbang features (for the time),
but they didn't exactly pander to the real business needs
(I don't recall if the full PL/I language supported the
picture formatting or not). Certainly one of PL/I's
downfalls, was the shear size of the language, for the
time.
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg