[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[DaveFroble]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/31/2018 2:53 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
>> On Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 6:38:27 PM UTC-6, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> I can only think of one type of application where I would
>>> consider Fortran an obvious candidate: number crunching
>>> (BLAS, LAPACK etc.).
>>
>> FORTRAN excels at processing disparate data sources. Pulling in files
>> from IBM and other operating systems where the data must be binary
>> because it is far too massive to be converted to XML.
> Other languages reads binary files from different sources fine as
> well.
> 
> That is something most general purpose languages do fine.
> 
> What is unique in Fortran?
> 
>>>> COBOL the same way.  There are things these languages do that
>>>> other languages do not do as well.
>>>
>>> Cobol I can not even think of one type. But that may of course
>>> be my lack of Cobol knowledge. When I hear Cobol features I
>>> think: structs, BCD, database access, basic procedural programming.
>>> Which is covered in most modern languages.
>>>
>>
>> For decades COBOL has been the mainstay of payroll and financial systems.
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> It solves those pesky floating point calculation problems introduced
>> by IEEE data types.
> 
> Most other languages has also solved that problem.
> 
>> Any shop which has used it for a decade or more also has a massive 
>> quantity
>> of copy-libs containing business specific knowledge.
> 
> Yes. Code base and skill sets provide some inertia, but that is not
> a Cobol specific feature, that is a general thing that switching
> from X to Y has some associated cost and risk.
> 
>> Unlike C and other languages with a SORT verb,
> 
> C does not have a sort verb.
> 
> C has a qsort function.
> 
>>    the data can be in a file of massive size. Those other sort verbs 
>> require it to be in RAM.
>> With COBOL SORT you can even sort on values which do not natively 
>> exist on the input file.
> 
> There are libraries for sorting large disk files for other languages.
> 
> But having it coming with the compiler is a benefit.

Ahh, hmm, that's an interesting perspective.

Yes, there have been times I've implemented the "stupid bubble sort" in 
programs, for rather small number of items.  I've also invoked the VMS sort 
utility from within programs, both in memory sort, and file sort.

With a relational database and SQL I can easily specify the ordering of a dataset.

I'd guess my question is, if the OS, or the environment, or whatever supplies 
the needed capability, what use is there for each language to supply their own 
sorting, most likely incompatible with each other?  Just seems to me that 
sorting is something to be universal, not language specific.

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