[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/24/2023 8:07 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> 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.

> 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).

"most important" is a very general term.

It may be true from the perspective of "what if all code written
in the language stopped working". Most widely used OS'es,
many compilers & runtime libraries and a lot of platform
software (databases, web servers, message queues, distributed
caches etc.) are written in C and/or C++. And almost everything
relies on that.

But I don't think it is true from a "what is their share of
the total IT landscape" perspective. From actual usage
today C and C++ are both tier 2 languages (tier 1 being
JavaScript, Python and Java - and tier 2 also including
C# and PHP). And for what should be used then I will
claim that C should rarely be used and C++ only rarely
be used - for the typical business application there are
better languages - and very few developers actually
write OS's, language runtime libraries, databases
and web servers.

> 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 ??? ]]]

I believe DEC C++ is far worse than DEC C.

The C standard has not evolved that much and I would expect
most C Code to build with DEC C.

The C++ standard has evolved a lot and getting actively
maintained C++ code to build on VMS may very well be
impossible.

And based on internet gossip then I believe the problem with
both MySQL/MariaDB and OpenJDK are for C++ not for C.

So we wait for clang.    :-)

And note that it is not just C and C++ that has been neglected
over the years. Fortran is also way behind. And Cobol even
though in that case I doubt there is much demand for the
new features.

Arne