[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[P. Sture]

In article <7j7128F34epr5U2 at mid.individual.net>,
 billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:

> In article <slrnhcqtmn.n64.rivie at stench.no.domain>,
> 	Roger Ivie <rivie at ridgenet.net> writes:
> > On 2009-10-08, Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
> >> It was  Fortran IV on a Univac 1100 running Exec-8.  Of
> >> course, the programs in question were also proof that it is not
> >> only C that gets used for the wrong purposes.  These were business
> >> applications written in Fortran by engineers who needed something
> >> to doto keep them busy during slow summers. 
> > 
> > A friend of mine wrote a compiler in Microsoft's FORTRAN for CP/M.
> 
> I know (knew) of at least one commercial COBOL compiler that claimed to
> be written in COBOL.  It's not just people writing business apps in C
> that are using the wrong tool for the job.
> 

I remember reading the case for doing that for one of those COBOL compilers,
and it seemed pretty convincing at the time. To me anyway.

But this brings us to the price of compilers. Most of my customers in 
the VAX era had a COBOL compiler and that was it. Wrong tool or not, 
COBOL did get used for systems programming on occasion (and yours truly 
did it, though only for low volumes of data).

-- 
Paul Sture