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From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: How standard is COBOL ?
Message-ID: <951@opus.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Nov-84 03:33:26 EST
Article-I.D.: opus.951
Posted: Tue Nov 13 03:33:26 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Nov-84 02:01:52 EST
References: <422@houxj.UUCP>
Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO
Lines: 36

> 	I have almost no experience with COBOL, but I thought
> it was very well standardized, compared to most languages.
> ...
> 	But I was reading the Nov 84 Unix/World, and the
> article "A Software Vendor's Search" by Neal Nelson
> says "... I had written applications in Data General COBOL,
> IBM Series/1 COBOL and IBM 370 COBOL.  The manufacturer
> and operating system had made these three versions of COBOL
> so different that moving from one machine to another was
> almost as difficult as starting over in a new language."
> 
> 	Is this typical of different COBOL versions ?

COBOL is certainly standardized, but there are two problems:

	It has a real peculiarity--implementors are allowed to add reserved
	words!  Given the structure of COBOL, most extensions will require
	new words.  Given the application area for COBOL, there's a
	reasonable chance that new reserved words will collide with the
	identifiers used in a program written for a different
	implementation.

	It's an old language.  The older a language gets, the more
	extensions are added, to solve new problems or solve old problems
	better.  The extensions differ, so you have to be careful about
	what "features" you use if you're trying to write programs which
	are both portable and reasonably efficient.

The second problem can be battled with care and a standard-checking
compiler.  The only hope for the first one (something I attacked once) is to
collect a huge list of all of the reserved words on all the implementations
you can find out about, and avoid ALL of the words.  (The list will be in
the hundreds of words.)
-- 
Dick Dunn	{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd		(303)444-5710 x3086
   ...Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.