> On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 09:16:43 PM PDT, David Crayford > <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The raison d’être of the mainframe is to run applications written in COBOL. Companies could convert COBOL to C++ without a problem but you can't move those programs to Linux. The need for z/OS has nothing to do with the language and everything with design. > My point is that IBM don’t invest in COBOL to implement > features in the language standard whereas MicroFocus do. MicroFocus Cobol is supposed to be compatible with z/OS. If those features were important to customers, why aren't they running MicroFocus Cobol? > I mostly program in C++ and Java these days and take it for > granted that they have built-in standard libraries for data structures > and algorithms. If these libraries are useful to the business, they would use C++ and Java. More important, they could find programmers willing to code C++ and Java. > COBOL doesn’t even support dynamic arrays but most COBOL programmers > are used to having to use the file system to make up for the lack collections. Would you have difficulties implementing dynamic arrays for Cobol? What business reason makes this a requirement? They could write this in C++ but choose to write this in Cobol. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
