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What makes COBOL well suited for commercial applications?

Hi Jimmy! It's been while and glad to see you are still kicking it here on the forum.

Thank you, still kicking but certainly not very high anymore!
 
Hello Jimmy - How's your System /36 these days.

Specifically (re this thread) I've never used COBOL, although I do have a little book about it!!

However, most of my professional software work has revolved around the dBASE/Clipper/FoxPro/xHarbour systems, and this family shows signes of being a sort of derivative of COBOL, certainly the print formatting of data, esp numeric, looks very similar. The Clipper compiler etc added more control structures which may not have been in the original dBASE. Things said about COBOL often seem to apply to Clipper etc as well?

Geoff
 
GeoffB17 said:
Hello Jimmy - How's your System /36 these days.

Specifically (re this thread) I've never used COBOL, although I do have a little book about it!!

However, most of my professional software work has revolved around the dBASE/Clipper/FoxPro/xHarbour systems, and this family shows signes of being a sort of derivative of COBOL, certainly the print formatting of data, esp numeric, looks very similar. The Clipper compiler etc added more control structures which may not have been in the original dBASE. Things said about COBOL often seem to apply to Clipper etc as well?

Geoff
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Geoff I am spent 50 plus years in the banking IT area. Also all of it on IBM midranges. Still today most of the Banking Core Systems are developed in COBOL or RPG/400. The System/36s 5364s are up and running, thanks to a lot of help.
 
Jimmy said:
Still today most of the Banking Core Systems are developed in COBOL or RPG/400
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So, here's a question. I'm ignorant of RPG.

But is COBOL "hard enough" that it warranted something like RPG? As I understand it, RPG not as flexible as COBOL, that RPG is good for reporting. But I don't know.

Just curious what decisions were made for RPG to better fit the niche that it runs in over COBOL. Does RPG have automatic breaking/sorting logic that COBOL does not?

I've used dedicated reporting languages before, and they're wonderful, but not RPG.
 
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whartung said:
So, here's a question. I'm ignorant of RPG.

But is COBOL "hard enough" that it warranted something like RPG? As I understand it, RPG not as flexible as COBOL, that RPG is good for reporting. But I don't know.

Just curious what decisions were made for RPG to better fit the niche that it runs in over COBOL. Does RPG have automatic breaking/sorting logic that COBOL does not?

I've used dedicated reporting languages before, and they're wonderful, but not RPG.
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The original ANSI COBOL had both a built in report writer, and a sort facility. On the other hand on IBM kit at least RPG originally was only provided on mid-range boxes, and therefore did not have the scalability of COBOL.

I don't really know RPG but I think that on both the mainframes I am familiar with, that is IBM and Honeywell L66/DPS8, a lot of the COBOL runs under some kind of Transaction Control system, so CICS OR IMS on IBM, or TDS or TP8 on Honeywell, that provides facilites "Transactional Integrity" to ensure that a particular transaction is either executed in its entirety, or in the event of an error occurring, not executed at all, and also interfaces to database systems, that were not present in RPG.
 
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