From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5faad1722103f6a7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!news.moat.net!border1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!sjc1.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!nf3.bellglobal.com!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics (COBOL Popularity) References: <90Stc.15309$be.3117@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net> <40b86431$0$186$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk> <40B888E0.5040707@noplace.com> <40B8C86A.3050302@noplace.com> <40BE6BFD.8030305@noplace.com> <40BF141F.8020001@noplace.com> <40C38E7C.64564F@notes.udayton.edu> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 12:51:58 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1086972653 198.96.223.163 (Fri, 11 Jun 2004 12:50:53 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 12:50:53 EDT Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1395 Date: 2004-06-11T12:51:58-04:00 List-Id: Richard Riehle wrote: > "I R T" 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