Perhaps I can put this in some historical context for the MOVE vs COPY choice.
Decades ago Grace Hopper spoke at an ASM meeting I attended. The folks on the ENIAC team developed a COBOL precerser that looked a bit like English. Actually they had observed that in most languages, commands start with the verb. Since they spoke English, their language was English-like, but it was table driven so that the equivilent words from other languages could be substituted. This was an idea that never took off. To simplify and speed the table look up, it was decided that the commands had to be unique in their first and third characters. Perhaps there was some other command that blocked the use of COPY. Or perhaps the choice of MOVE was made necessary because it was decided to use COPY to copy stuff from a library of commonly used stuff. (I use stuff rather than try to list the kinds of things one can copy into the library.) One amusing Grace Hopper story from that meeting: She told of a time visiting a data center in Japan. When it came time for her to leave, she discovered her ride had left without her. The programmers at the data center spoke no English and she spoke no Japanese. But the programmers were coding in COBOL. In their programs, all the variable names were in Japanese, but the language elements were English words. So she asked the programmers to MOVE her TO her hotel. She got there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
