COBOL is the new Lisp.
IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
VMS Software, the newest maintainers of OpenVMS, have continued the hobbyist program. https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/
Except this bit: Please note that in accordance with the license agreement between VMS Software Inc. and HPE, VMS Software Inc. are not able to distribute VAX licenses. Since I've got actual Vaxen it doesn't help.
So back to the original question, what about macro32, the VAX emulator built into VMS on alpha and itanium?
Where you have the source, you can build a native binary. Where you lack it, perhaps the emulation is sufficiently robust.
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#83COBOL will always have a soft spot in my heart as the first programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract, artistic sense. It was the ultimate litmus test. COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even the default. But some of these programmers (not incl…
I worked on the IBM COBOL compiler in a past life. It's not LLVM based; the optimizer and code generator are derived from J9, the IBM JVM. I would be a bit surprised if they open-sourced it; OpenJ9 is open-sourced, but the COBOL compiler for Z is one of those rare compilers that is still being sold to paying customers.
> I worked on the IBM COBOL compiler in a past life. It's not LLVM based; the optimizer and code generator are derived from J9, the IBM JVM.
Does it have anything in common with XL C? Does it use W code as an intermediate language?
And what language is it written in? (PL/X? PL.8? C/C++?)
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can assure you that "Quickbook Payroll" would not be able to handle this on a similarly resourced x86 machine. Not even close. Why? I've been into x86 databases since the Windows NT days and 5000 doesn't seem an impressive number to me.
The OP's comment was conditional: on a similarly resourced x86 machine . Windows, let alone Quickbooks is not going to run very well on a machine with just 512MB of RAM.
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Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#85I remember years ago there was a contest for the most error messages from the fewest lines of code from a compiler. I believe you could get the IBM COBOL compiler to generate 600 lines of error messages if you put a single period in column 6. Of course times have changed and I don't know how to get a punched card into a linux machine. :)
> I remember years ago there was a contest for the most error messages from the fewest lines of code from a compiler.
When I started being exposed to and interested in computers around 1982, I inherited a stack of Creative Computing magazines dating back to maybe 1978-ish.
I remember reading about these error message contests in Creative Computing.
Today, I understand why that was. In the olden days, it was important to get as much information from a single compiler run, because interactive computing wasn't universal. Programmers had to share a machine and submit programs in the forms of decks of punched cards to a job submission window. You would not want to fix one error per round trip.
This means compilers had to be smart about error recovery: to try to repair the program after an error, and then keep going to get more information out of it. Whenever error recovery inserts a token into the program (like a suspected missing closing parenthesis), it is making the program longer, and risks confusing itself and creating a runaway loop that has to be curbed somehow.
I suspect the best solutions to these contests must have been exploiting features of error recovery; tricking the compiler into creating a cascade of errors out of something small.
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#86COBOL will always have a soft spot in my heart as the first programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract, artistic sense. It was the ultimate litmus test. COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even the default. But some of these programmers (not incl…
35% of the total installed capacity world wide today is Linux on Z and is growing at double digit rates each year. RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu and most recently CoreOS (with OpenShift) all run beautifully. Ultimately, it's just hardware and it's what people do on it that matters.
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#87I remember years ago there was a contest for the most error messages from the fewest lines of code from a compiler. I believe you could get the IBM COBOL compiler to generate 600 lines of error messages if you put a single period in column 6. Of course times have changed and I don't know how to get a punched card into a linux machine. :)
You could get a $600 bill of AWS Lambda for forgetting a ; today too Not much has changed.
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#88I remember the first IDE I ever used back in 1988 on MS-DOS was a COBOL IDE from 1983. It felt ancient back then too!
> It felt ancient back then too!
Sir, the politically correct term today is..vintage.
Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#89Re: IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
#90One of the VAX computers I rescued from disposal at the height of the Y2K impending apocolypse came with licenses (PAKs for those in the know) for DEC COBOL, DEC RDBMS, and DEC FORMS. These three applications formed the backbone of payroll processing for the company that was tossing the VAX. This machine, processed the payroll for a bit over 5,000 employees on a "clustered" machine that had a combined total of 512MB…
What's so burdensome about payroll processing? It seems straightforward enough.