Just to make it clear:
of course, the friends from Poland could have converted the reports
themselves manually from TABU to COBOL. But that would have been very
time consuming, and so the idea was to have a program doing this. So I
was asked
if I could provide a program that translated the reports to COBOL
automatically.
Because I got my computer science diploma some years ago, I thought that
this
should indeed be possible, and I decided to do it using the PASCAL/VS
compiler,
which I used always in those days on the VM operating system.
I was then asked, how much time this would need, and I said: 150 hrs,
but management
decided, that I only got budget for 100 hrs. In the end, with testing
and removing errors,
we needed almost exactly 150 hrs - which were paid, of course.
I did most of the development on the PC using Turbo Pascal etc. and
moved the
programs to the mainframe only after the local tests ran well - much the
same as I
do it today, but today I am using C instead of Pascal.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 23.11.2012 10:19, schrieb Bernd Oppolzer:
I believe that if a programming tool or language is developed locally
for a local crowd of customers, there will always be the possibility that
the local language will be used.
In 1992, we helped some friends in Poland (Lodz) to transform their
applications from a polish machine called ODRA (it was based on a british
ICL machine) to an IBM 4381 mainframe. On the ODRA, they had a report
writer using a language called TABU. This language used polish keywords;
if was a little bit like RPG 2, but in my opinion more user friendly.
ODRA, by the way, is the polish name of the river Oder which separates
Poland from Germany.
My task was: to convert the some hundred TABU reports to COBOL programs,
so I first had to learn a little polish, of course. I still remember
that there was
a special symbol for "counter" or "tally", the polish name, which was
a strange
combination (in my eyes) of Zs and Ys. Don't remember it.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 22.11.2012 21:51, schrieb Paul Gilmartin:
On Thu, 22 Nov 2012 19:33:14 +0000, Lindy Mayfield wrote:
But to still bring things back on topic, my initial query was, "Is
there anything so inherently better about the English language that
makes it more useful for computer languages?"
Which, with a little searching, got me to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages#Languages_based_on_symbols_instead_of_keywords
Note the second entry in that section.
-- gil
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