Re: Basic structure COBOL


"CG" <Carl.Gehr.ButNoSPAMStuff@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Pete Dashwood wrote:
"CG" <Carl.Gehr.ButNoSPAMStuff@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Pete Dashwood wrote:
"Robin Lee" <robinlee@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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HeyBub wrote:
Get
Mull
Put
Actually I think that's PL1.


LOL! Nice one, Robin... :-)

It almost is...
Of course, it is PL/I [not PL1], but in a thread like this, I guess
close counts... [No comment on the rest.]
Carl

Why would you correct him on the name of the language, Carl?

It was originally PL/I as you state. IBM believed everyone would move to
it so, "Program Language/ International"

When this dream failed to eventuate, they renamed it as their first
attempt, and later manuals showed "PL/1".

(I have seen IBM manuals with each of these names on the cover, depending
on when they were published.)

We have never seen, and are now unlikely to, PL/2.

Why? Well, I guess, since the rest of the thread was certainly not going
to provide a serious response to the original question, the quality of the
thread was not going to be harmed by the comment. And, if someone is
going to criticize something, they should at least improve their
credibility by demonstrating that they know the correct name of the
product. I react the same way when I see 'Cobol' instead of 'COBOL' in
print.

I doubt you have ever seen an 'official' IBM publication that used PL/1 or
PL1 or PLI.

Well there was one with a green cover and one with a red cover; they both
had a blue IBM logo on them...

However, it WAS a long time ago and I don't feel strongly enough about it to
insist... :-)


IBM is very careful about things like that, but humans being what they are,
and because IBM does not have a lawyer review every writing from its
employees, there are cases where errors slip through. When I have an
opportunity, I often suggest to those individuals that they should correct
their text.

And, FWIW, the 'I' was never for 'International' but simply a Roman
Numeral 'I'.

Yes, I know that is the official IBM position and I have heard this from
several IBM managers.

Obviously we have experienced history from different perspectives. :-) It
was while I was working for IBM at Hursley Park that I was told this story,
by someone who claimed to have been on the development team. Who knows? It
sounded plausible and I believed him.


And, to be completely factual, the 'original' name of the language was not
PL/I [Programming Language/One], but was 'New Programming Language' and
referred to as 'NPL' in some cases.

Yes he mentioned that as well.

That acronym was the subject of a loud objection by the UK National
Measurement Laboratory, so IBM changed the name.


I didn't know about that :-)


DL/I was another product, similarly named that was often referred to
incorrectly. While I do not know for sure, I believe that the reason DB2
was named as it is, was due to the confusions with DL/I and PL/I. Thus DB2
was picked rather than DB/II or DB/2.

But, I guess you'll not accept DB2 as a viable database until there is a
DB3...


Not at all. I've been using DB2 since it became available in the UK in 1983.
(At that ime I was still working on mainframes). I took a lot of stick in
this forum for encouraging others to use it. (What?! All that overhead when
I can use ISAM/VSAM?!) Today it is a perfectly good RDB implementation.
(Mind you, I don't know of any "bad" ones :-)) These days I use MySQL,
ACCESS and SQL Server, but I have never forgotten that my first learning
experience with RDB was DB2.

Pete.


.

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