[Info-vax] completion status from LIB$SPAWN

[Paul Sture]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:27:47 -0400, David Froble wrote:

> MG wrote:
>> On 28-4-2012 3:46, David Froble wrote:
>>> I'm assuming that's not good, so I'd ask, what would you prefer?
>>> Surely not the gibberish that is called "C". I could meet you half way
>>> with Macro-32 ....
>>>
>>> I know I'm biased, and so is everyone else in favor of what they're
>>> used to, but I find Basic to be more understandable than anything
>>> else, most likely because English is my only language.
>> 
>> What about COBOL?
>> 
>>  - MG
> 
> There is such a thing as too verbose.

There's also the history of compilers to consider.  In my experience many 
commercial users (as opposed to scientific or academic users) who came to 
VAX/VMS in the early 1980s fell into 2 main camps:

a) those who came from PDPs or other minis where BASIC was very popular
b) those who came from more traditional mainframes where COBOL was
   pretty much king for business applications (IBM also had PL/I users
   in this sector).

In general, those who had used BASIC before continued to use it on VMS, 
although I heard various reports that attempting to migrate existing code
resulted in poor performance.

The early versions of COBOL for VMS that I came across were pretty 
restrictive in comparison with VAX-COBOL once that came out.  COBOL's aim 
of being "platform independent" often meant that you were restricted to 
the lowest common denominator.  For example, the versions before
VAX-COBOL had no support for global variables, and that was in some 
standard or other.

As to COBOL being verbose, well yes it was, but not in the way you might 
think from looking at code today.  I had never used a variable or 
subroutine name longer than 5 or 6 characters, and along came COBOL with 
support for 32 (?) character names. Eek!

The other thing about traditional COBOL shops was that you coded using 
pencil and paper and submitted your program sheets to the punch card 
operators.  This led to the phrase "COBOL writer's cramp".

One local company's programming department was laid out like a school 
classroom: all the programmers sat at rows of desks and the chief 
programmer sat at the front on a raised platform.  Needless to say, not 
many wanted to work there ;-)

All that changed with a terminal per programmer and decent editors of 
course.

If you take a look at this COBOL program

http://odl.sysworks.biz/disk$vaxdocjun001/progtool/cobol56/
cob_um.p580.bkb#1820

you can easily see what a pain it would be to write using pencil and 
paper.  Given a decent editor and a COBOL compiler which can include 
record layouts at compile time, the job suddenly becomes a lot easier.

-- 
Paul Sture