[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Neil Rieck]

On Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 6:43:28 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 2/23/2023 3:28 PM, ultr... at gmail.com wrote: 
> > On Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 8:05:34 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> >>>>> On Friday, February 17, 2023 at 1:35:57 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> >>>>>>> C++ <<<< 
> >>> 
> >>> IF THAT ISN'T A PROMOTION OF C OVER DIBOL I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS ... 
> >> Er, Bob, C and C++ are two very, very, different languages. 
> >
> > I HELPED MY SON WITH C++ AND C# IN COLLEGE ... SAME OLD C SAME OLD COMPILER/DEBUGGER ISSUES
> C and C++ are very different languages. Most C code will compile and 
> run as expected when compiled with a C++ compiler, but C++ is 
> so much more than C - and a writing C code for a C++ course 
> should give a very low grade. 
> 
> And C# is not like C at all. Besides using curly braces and 
> having the 3 arg for loop then I do not see much similarity. 
> 
> Just compare the hello worlds: 
> 
> #include<stdio.h> 
> 
> int main() 
> { 
> printf("Hello world!\n"); 
> return 0; 
> } 
> 
> VS: 
> 
> using System; 
> 
> public class HelloWorld 
> { 
> public static void Main(string[] args) 
> { 
> Console.WriteLine("Hello world!"); 
> } 
> } 
> 
> (C# pre-V9.0) 
> 
> Arne

People reading this already know that both C and C++ are the two most important languages of all time. So much so that almost all other applications and  languages (everything from COBOL to Python3) are now written in one or the other (usually the other). Here is a short list from Bjarne Stroustrup: https://www.stroustrup.com/applications.html

Unfortunately, the companies maintaining DEC-C and DEC-C++ over the years did not agree so those DEC products were not kept up-to-date. For example, both MySQL and MariaDB (after version 5.5) cannot be ported to OpenVMS (yet) because those database engines require a version of C/C++ known as C11.

But like a bad dream, the problem now involves a moving target:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_(C_standard_revision)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C17_(C_standard_revision)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2x [[[ C23 ??? ]]]

In this I blame DEC, Compaq and HP (the first one in this list also tried to block TCP/IP on VMS). The only company trying to correct this problem is VSI and we can only imagine the difficulty involved in adding new features while not breaking the existing tool sets. So do you fix the existing tools; build a cross-compiler; or do something else? I don't know but I'm sure the good folks at VSI will figure it out because if they do not, then that will be the end of OpenVMS. Sure you would be able to run old stuff along with some carefully controlled new stuff (eg. Apache httpd has be carefully controlled to not employ new language features) but you will not be so lucky with other products.   

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net/OpenVMS.html