On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 19:47:21 +0000, The Natural Philosopher declaimed the following:
The designer was an organization* -- CODASYL (Committee on Data Systems and Languages) -- who were heavily influenced by prior work by Hopper, and was part of a DoD effort to create a portable language for data processing (So if one wanted supply computers to the DoD, one had to support COBOL on them [this predated computers being small enough to embed into products other than data processing])
* And that has often been declared the death knell for Ada also, as it came out as a product of the HOLWG (High Order Language Working Group) for the DoD.
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Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
That's useful, but I suspect it is an IBM-specific feature because its not mentioned in either of my COBOL books, which were published in 1983 "A COBOL Handbook (Christopher Russell) and 1985 "The Illustrated RM COBOL Book" (Deborah Stone) and both describe ANSI 74 COBOL.
I see from the above IBM reference that mixed case (and all lower case?) is now accepted in COBOL source code. When was that standardised. Asking because I haven't written standards-compliant COBOL since 1984, apart from a little distinctly non-standard Tandem S-COBOL.
That is about what the IBM 1401 Fortran did. It kept the target program in the core and executed tens of compiler overlays from the backing store (disk/tape).
It's a long, long, long time since I tried it (36 years ago) but ISTR compiling an ALGOL program on my DG Nova 1200 was an 11 pass operation using paper tape. i.e. 11 tapes in the compiler/assembler/linker/loader plus the intermediate tapes punched.
On Sat, 14 Mar 2020 01:08:21 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following:
Probably... I don't recall it from my college (Xerox Sigma 6, COBOL-74), and haven't seen it in either of "Mastering COBOL: Year 2000 and Other Legacy Code Solutions" (Carol Baroudi; 1999 Sybex) or "COBOL From Micro to Mainframe: Preparing for the New Millenium 3rd ed" (Grauer/Villar/Buss; 2000 Prentice Hall) *
Not sure about lower case, but COBOL-2002, as I recall, introduced "free-form" source -- no longer requiring top-level statements start in
8-11, and sublevels to start in 12+
Both texts included a version of Fujitsu COBOL v4 (Compiler, IDE, support for Visual BASIC, preliminary OO features, and a capability for COBOL applications with GUIs [PowerCOBOL] -- but did not include a distributable run-time library)... Unfortunately, it won't install on anything newer than W98.
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Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
On a sunny day (Sat, 14 Mar 2020 13:59:11 +0000) it happened mm0fmf wrote in :
-> 2020 - 39 = 1981
I was having a lot of fun with the ZX80 in those days
formatting link
29 January 1980
I do remember connecting a printer to it (a Brother with thermal paper) to print receipts for the TV repair shop I had at that time, had to make a serial interface for that, even advertised that interface in a big newspaper. Written in ... ZX80 BASIC! That ZX80 was really a game changer, very very good BASIC.
Thanks - if I ever write it again, I'll use one of the Linux ports and see what that can handle.
Hmmm, guessing here, but the ancestor of this might well be ICL2900 COBOL, since Fujitsu picked up support for that kit when our goverment of the day let ICL crumble into ruin. Similarly I believe that VME/B is still alive and kicking, running under an emulator on X86 hardware.
The old Elliott 503 I learnt Algol 60 on, in 1967, might have had paper tape input and paper tape plus lineprinter output and only 8 Kwords of 39 bit memory, but it also has a speed boost secret - 32 Kwords of 50 uS
39bit core backing store.
No linker needed because separately compiled programs could call each other - effectively dynamically linked libraries in the late 60s!
The compiler, assembler and utilities plus any big data arrays that might belong to user programs and (presumably) compiler workfiles all lived on the core backing store, so the thing was quite quick.
You could book blocks of time for serious stuff, or run compiles and small jobs in automatically timed 3 minute slots. That was plenty for my work: I was using the beast to analyse paper tape output from a Mossbauer Spectrometer. A compile and analytic run on my data took well under 3 minutes (no storage space for compiled programs was available), so I never needed to book time on it. A lovely, but very large, box. It was entirely built using discrete transistors and ferrite core memory since it predated the invention of the first integrated circuits. Its floating point operations were slightly faster than its integer arithmetic, and no, I have no idea how its designers managed that feat.
My NOVA that lived in the garage had some DG cassette tape drives that didn't work, an 8 port RS232 card, and 16kW of ferrite core. The CPU was all TTL and the ALU was bit slice, 1x 74181 TTL ALU unit with each
16bit word split into 4bit nibble operations. It took 4 clocks to do each instruction. ISTR the NOVA 3 was faster as it had 4x 74181 in it. And a tape reader.
Classic 'proper' computing were you toggled in the boot loader on the switches, loaded the tape and hit go and off it went.
The instruction set was wonderfully simple to use in assembler. No hardware stack, you saved the return address for a subroutine in the first few words of your called function as there was no ROM to worry about then.
It had been scrapped a few times by the time I got it. Just a toy but one that was too big for the house.
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