| William M. Klein 2007-10-08, 6:55 pm |
| I don't know exactly why EXAMINE was removed and INSPECT was added. As far as I
can tell TRANSFORM was never part of any ANSI Standard. In fact, the '74
Standard did not have the functionality of TRANSFORM in its version of INSPECT.
That came "back" with the '85 Standard when INSPECT CONVERTING (rather than
REPLACING) was added.
If I had a copy of the '74 Standard, I probably could "look up" in its
Substantive Change section what the rationale was. However, they have scanned
the '68 Standard, but not the '74 -- so I don't have a copy. (EXAMINE was in
it).
There is one VAGUE possibility (and I haven't researched this). It seems to me
that I heard at one time (maybe the '60 definition - maybe later) there was an
attempt to have the first 2 characters of all COBOL verbs be unique. EXAMINE
and EXIT would have "violated" that. However, I think that INITIATE (and RW)
was in by '74, that doesn't sound like the reason. Furthermore, I thought that
DISPLAY and DIVIDE were "always" in, so I am not certain that this was really
ever true.
Bottom-Line:
I don't know why they made the change.
--
Bill Klein
wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
"LX-i" <lxi0007@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:ZsydnXb3zJqgzpfanZ2dnUVZ_tCrnZ2d@co
mcast.com...
> William M. Klein wrote:
>
> That makes sense...
>
>
> That too makes sense. The people that wrote it know what they meant, but if
> they don't express it clearly enough, others don't get that insight. Of
> course, there's also the desire of some folks to see something in particular,
> especially when their compiler already works that way. :)
>
>
> Yikes! That's a horrendous construct to begin with... But, I also realize
> that I came to COBOL *way* late in the game, so I have the perspective of
> learning from what others have done. I first saw COBOL in February of 1998.
> :)
>
> Are you familiar with the rationale regarding combining EXAMINE, INSPECT, and
> TRANSFORM? I had forgotten about transform - and the syntax seemed a bit more
> intuitive to me. Of course, they trained us on COBOL 85, but then put us in a
> COBOL 74 shop - so, we didn't learn a whole lot about the features that had
> been removed in the 85 standard. Was it just an attempt to reduce the number
> of reserved words? Why not keep EXAMINE and TRANSFORM and ditch INSPECT? :)
>
> --
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