Gerhard's point is well made and of even wider application than he notes. In commercial shops it is almost always possible to determine1) the history an application in the sense that the current COBOL source programs for it reflect in obvious ways the fact that it was once implemented in AUTOCODER or RPG and 2) the experience and training of its programmers in the sense that a) the organization of a LISP (sic) routine clearly reflects its writers' chief experience as COBOL programmers or that b) a PL/I routine can be seen immediately to be a species of COBOL with semicolons.
As Otto Neurath once put it, 'Ontology recapitulates philology'. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
