mat@hou5d.UUCP (11/30/83)
``COBOL is about the most portable language there is.'' -Michael Turner. Hmm. I'm not a COBOL programmer, though I helped debug and port a couple of COBOL programs. Most portable? One program, which ran perfectly on an IBM system, USING EXTENSIONS to language symantics provided BY IBM took about 15 hours (for about 12 pages of code) to port to an HP 3000. Example? Assume that A is a subcomponent of B. Then look at this code fragment: MOVE BLANKS-3 TO A. MOVE A TO B. since A is a subcomponent of B, and since B consists of many elements, there is no sense in which the ojects could be conformable. The IttyBittyMachine compiler made sense of it somehow. The HP compiler responded with pages of error messages. NEXT! Mark Terribile