[Info-vax] DIBOL-11

[Dave Froble]

On 3/10/2023 6:56 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Dibol was on the PDP-8.  As far as I know, the PDP-8 didn't have Cobol or Basic. 
  Only with RSTS on the PDP-11 did DEC have Basic+.  So Dibol pre-dates some 
other languages that DEC had.

As for the RPG question, I don't know.

> 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
>
>
>


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David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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