[Info-vax] VMS Software needs to port VAX DIBOL to OpenVMS X86 platform

[Chris Townley]

On 15/12/2020 18:31, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-12-15, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12/15/20 10:53 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>
>>> The claim was not that it used Cobol syntax but that it
>>> was inspired by Cobol.
>>
>> It looks much more inspired by Fortran given any examination of
>> a program source example.
>>
> 
> At a conceptual level, the RECORD statement in DIBOL heavily resembles
> the COBOL data division definition of variables and structures even if
> the actual syntax is very different.
> 
> The general "feel" of the procedure section does feel sort-of Fortran-like.
> 
> Simon.
> 


 From Wikipedia:

DIBOL
Paradigm	procedural, imperative, structured
Developer	DEC
First appeared	1970
Stable release	DIBOL 1992 / 2002
Typing discipline	static
Major implementations
Synergex DBL, DEC VAX DIBOL, others

Influenced by
BASIC, Fortran, COBOL

DIBOL or Digital's Business Oriented Language is a general-purpose,
procedural, imperative programming language, designed for use in 
Management Information Systems (MIS) software development.

It has a syntax similar to FORTRAN and BASIC, along with BCD arithmetic. 
It shares the COBOL program structure of separate data and procedure 
divisions. Unlike Fortran's numeric labels (for GOTO), DIBOL's were 
alphanumeric; the language supported a counterpart to computed goto.


Chris