[Info-vax] Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?, was: Re: LMF Licence Generator Code

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/12/2021 2:58 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 2:58:11 AM UTC+12, Bill Gunshannon
> wrote:
>> Here we are 30 years later and there is still new COBOL being
>> written every day.
> 
> By whom, and for what?

Mostly business applications started more than 30 years ago.

> What I found ironic was the premise that COBOL was written
> specifically for “business-oriented” uses, eschewing any of that
> “scientific” stuff like mathematical notation and floating point, or
> even any decent dynamic string handling.
> 
> Then, a decade or two later, came along these things called
> “relational databases”, which were enthusiastically adopted by
> businesses--the very market that COBOL was supposedly optimized for.
> 
> But it turns out the best way to interface to a relational DBMS is to
> generate SQL query strings. And for that, you need decent string
> handling, with facilities for format substitution, argument quoting
> and the like. None of which were envisaged in the original design of
> COBOL.

This is so wrong in many ways.

1) The STRING construct in COBOL is perfectly capable
    of doing string concatenation.

2) In the context of accessing a database then the elegance/efficiency
    of string concatenation is not significant.

3) The vast majority of COBOL programs accessing a relation database
    use embedded SQL and the SQL is not built as a string by the
    developer.

Arne