Ruby vs. Rails

[John W. Kennedy]

Although COBOL is not my favorite tool, I don't know of
any arguably superior replacements for it (all things
considered) in the environments where it is used.

PL/I and Ada '95. But the current ISO COBOL has finally lost most of
COBOL's worst faults, if you include the new option that finally repairs
the decades-old botching of the COMPUTE statement.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

PL/I and Ada '95.

PL/I was intended to replace both Fortran and COBOL. In fact it did
neither. Is PL/I even still in use today? I don't recall seeing an open
source PL/I compiler.

Ada, on the other hand, was intended to be a language for managing large
projects. I think it was a beautiful design, as far as I know it is
still in use today, and there is in fact an open source compiler.

So ... one out of two ain't bad, eh?

 

[William Grosso]

Well, there's JPL/I.


Bill

PL/I was intended to replace both Fortran and COBOL. In fact it did
neither. Is PL/I even still in use today? I don't recall seeing an open
source PL/I compiler.

Ada, on the other hand, was intended to be a language for managing large
projects. I think it was a beautiful design, as far as I know it is
still in use today, and there is in fact an open source compiler.

So ... one out of two ain't bad, eh?

 

[Martin Coxall]

Ada, on the other hand, was intended to be a language for managing

large
projects. I think it was a beautiful design, as far as I know it is
still in use today, and there is in fact an open source compiler.

So ... one out of two ain't bad, eh?

Ada never took off outside defence and aerospace industries, so it's
now intrinsically associated with them. It's a bit of a bondage-and-
discipline language, all told. You spend as much time satisfying the
compiler's neuroses as you do writing good code.

A high-functioning-autistic object-pascal.

Also, it has been steadily losing ground to Java.

Martin

 

[John W. Kennedy]

PL/I was intended to replace both Fortran and COBOL. In fact it did
neither. Is PL/I even still in use today?
Yes.

I don't recall seeing an open
source PL/I compiler.

There have been some efforts to genericize the old (F) compiler (though
it was written in assembler), which IBM published freely back in the
60's, when virtually all software was more or less open source, and
someone else is working on a gcc-based PL/I compiler right now. See
comp.lang.pl1. In any case, PL/I is still very much available on IBM
mainframes -- in fact, a brand-new compiler just came out a few years ago.

The bad news is that it still lacks OO.

Ada, on the other hand, was intended to be a language for managing large
projects. I think it was a beautiful design, as far as I know it is
still in use today, and there is in fact an open source compiler.

Ada 2005 is out.

Many features of Ada, by the way, were designed with the philosophy,
"PL/I had a good idea, but got it wrong; let's see if we can do better."

 

[Rick DeNatale]

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

There have been some efforts to genericize the old (F) compiler (though
it was written in assembler), which IBM published freely back in the
60's, when virtually all software was more or less open source,

Only in the sense that the source was available, most commonly on
microfiche, and primarily to help you read dumps so you could debug
your, and often IBM's software.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

Only in the sense that the source was available, most commonly on
microfiche, and primarily to help you read dumps so you could debug
your, and often IBM's software.

The complete source of OS/360 and other 360 operating systems (including
compilers, etc.) was available on tape, and for free. I myself used it
to add several features to DOS/360's PL/I compiler and to add a
job-accounting log to the JCL.