[Info-vax] Digital

[Nomen Nescio]

Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> wrote:

> > COBOL could be replaced (on a PC) by any of a number of good scripting
> > or reporting languages. It's not nearly as useful anywhere else as it
> > still is on a mainframe.
> 
> It was extremely useful on VAXes and then Alphas

I don't consider VAX or Alpha a PC but I guess you could say the Alpha
workstations were used as PCs. I meant specificially the IBM PC and
compatibles that people use in their homes. For business of course COBOL is
good, it just isn't a good fit for PCs for many reasons.

> to be so on IA64.  It could beat scripting languages hands down for 
> performance (although I must admit I never tried it against tools such as 
> Perl, which precompile scripts before execution).

Many of the scripting languages have VMs and fairly decent JIT bytecode
compilers nowadays including Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and Java. I'm not
claiming VMs and bytecode are as good or as fast as real compilers, I'm just
saying given the relative lack of features in PC COBOL implementations
vs. the mainframe implementation (and perhaps VAX and Alpha, I haven't seen
them) scripting languages are often a much better deal.

> COBOL is also far far more than a report generator.

Agreed, but it excels at reporting and moving money around, and moving money
around is very closely tied to reporting. For those two things, really
nothing is better, at least on the mainframe. Once you push COBOL out of its
envelope it starts failing badly.