In <[email protected]>, on 11/26/2012
at 02:05 PM, Gerhard Postpischil <[email protected]> said:
>The "first" language depends heavily on your definition of
>language. IBM's early users on the 700 series coded machine
>instructions, and manually assigned storage locations, something I
>would not call a language, but transcription. Assemblers on other
>machines were only marginally better.
Are you comparing assemblers on other machines to, e.g., SAP, or to
machine language. They were certainly more than marginally better than
machine language.
>Admiral Hopper's CoBOL
It wasn't hers also she certainly contributed a lot; it came from the
Short Range[1] Committee of CODASYL.
>existed in simpler form by 1952,
FLOW-MATIC didn't exist in 1952, and wasn't COBOL, although it was
certainly one of the languages that CODASYL looked at.
>but didn't become available on IBM machines until 1959.
Well, COMTRAN was available in 1957, but the COBOL specifications
weren't available until December 1959 and IBSYS came out in 1960.
Do you still have the -0 IBSYS/IBJOB manuals? I'm wondering what the
exact date was for IBJOB COBOL.
[1] Nor did she claim it was.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
Atid/2 <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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