| Frank Swarbrick 2004-07-02, 3:55 pm |
| What a discouraging post...
[color=darkred]
Warren,
In all my years of working at IBM mainframe sites, for software vendors,
and
with SHARE/GUIDE - I heard of one (exactly ONE) person/site that actually
used
the (required by FIPS) "flagging" mechanism to find out which extensions
they
were using in their source code.
That is one MORE site than I ever heard of using the Micro Focus or Fujitsu
facility for doing "extension flagging". Given that sites don't
(apparently)
care about writing "portable" source code - or that they don't think that
the
ANSI/ISO/FIPS language definitions are the "real-world" standard language,
I
question how much benefit there would ever be in "improving" the
standardization
of the language. The lack of using this flagging pre-dates the '85
Standard,
much less the (still not fully implemented) 2002 Standard.
FYI,
It is also interesting how many of the current COBOL compiler vendors
aren't
even "on" the committee(s) any more, e.g. AcuCorp, Liant, LegacyJ, HP
(representing Dec, Tandem, and the original HP). CA, "OpenCOBOL", etc).
When
considered with the fact that of the three vendors currently on J4 (IBM,
Micro
Focus, Unisys) only Micro Focus has publicly committed to EVER producing a
2002
conforming compiler - and I am not certain that they still state this.
Maybe I am agreeing with you (I am not positive exactly what you are
"advocating") - but the Standardization process simply doesn't seem
"relevant"
anymore - or at least not very.
NOTE:
The "death" of FIPS/NIST certification and US government "requirements"
for
conforming compilers seems highly relevant to this - and this PRE-dated the
"delays" in the delivery of the 2002 Standard.
--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
"Warren Simmons" <wsimmons5@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:40E3815F.5070303@optonline.net...[color=darkred]
> I don't know that this has anything to do with this subject, but
> here is an actual case....
>
> Corporate has multiple sites with IT services. For this story
> you only need to know that one was running a corporate wage payroll
> on an IBM 7010.
>
> To plan for backup, and load sharing, a decision was made to
> recompile the programs on the IBM 7xxx at the to be backup
> location.
>
> Since the IBM 7xxx had a bundle of registers, and other features,
> the compiler supplied by IBM took advantage of the hardware features.
> I'm half way sure that LE must have come form several situations like
> this as, what happened next was:
>
> Effort to install the backup site, and off load some from the fist site,
> was delayed by many months.
>
> Cause= the compilers were built by different teams, and to the hardware.
>
> When this COBOL CODASYL person was asked to explain to the VP
> responsible for all IT installations what was wrong with COBOL, as
> a good soldier, he said it's not our fault, it's IBM's.
> To which he responded somewhat: You better care if IBM is
> at fault, your pension fund had a lot of their stock.
>
> All of a sudden, the reason for leasing the incompatible
> other computer became clear, and it is possible there
> was egg on a lot of faces.
>
> Think about the PC and how it has changed the market.
>
> Warren
>
> Howard Brazee wrote:
>
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