[Info-vax] DIBOL-11

[bill]

On 3/11/2023 1:24 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 3/10/2023 7:15 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>> On 10/03/2023 23:56, 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.
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>
>> I am sure you could add a few more...
>>
> 
> But why would you want to ??
> 

And the really big difference is function and purpose.
COBOL, DIBOL, Fortran, BASIC, Pascal and RPG were domain
specific languages.  (I should mention here that two of
those languages were frequently used outside their domain and maybe that 
contributed to the later demise of domain specific languages.)
Never really sure why PL/I came about but that's IBM. :-)
All of the languages listed in the "today" list a general purpose
and not targeted at any particular problem.  I guess it comes
back to the efficiency question that I used to I used to raise
with my academic peers.  I always said efficiency was still important
while they insisted, "Why bother.  Just throw more hardware at the
problem."

bill