[Info-vax] DIBOL-11

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 3/10/2023 6:26 PM, bill wrote:
> Just something that popped into my head that I thought I would share.
> 
> I wondered why DIBOL came into being at all given what was already
> available from DEC.  And then it hit me.  It was obviously DEC's
> answer to IBM's RPG.
> 
> Does that sound right to anyone else?

I don't know Dibol - my understanding is that
it is a sort of a hybrid between Cobol and Basic.
I don't know RPG either.

But anyway.

They had Cobol, Basic and PL/I among what I would
call clearly business oriented languages plus Pascal,
Fortran and Ada  that also sometimes was used for
such programming.

But I am not so surprised they wanted Dibol as well.
There tend to always be a pretty broad palette of
programming languages for such general purpose.
Different domains, different developer preferences
etc. tend to steer towards many programming languages.
Having 4 or 7 languages does not seem
excessive to me.

If someone wanted to start such an application today,
then they would have even more choices. Java, Scala, Kotlin,
Groovy, C#, VB.NET, PHP and Python are definitely used for such
plus C, C++ and Go are also used for such.

Arne