John W Kennedy wrote:
If you mean the SORT statement of COBOL, of course it did!
No. I mean the standard IBM DOS sort. I was at several shops all of which used a third-party sort because the IBM DOS sort “did not work properly”. I don’t know exactly what the problem was.
Offhand, I don't offhand remember any ANSI standard feature of COBOL that wasn't present in IBM COBOL, except for the optional Report Writer feature, which was a moving target that IBM finally got tired of chasing in the 70s.
Yes, I think possibly it may have been something to do with the Report Writer features. But at this date I really don’t know.
There were, however, some major incompatibilities between IBM COBOL and other COBOLs due to things that standard COBOL hadn't bothered to standardize, such as the semantics of the COMPUTE statement, which were, incredibly, "implementation defined" from 1960 to 2002.
I recall nothing about the COMPUTE statement except that I used it a lot and that it worked as expected in IBM COBOL.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
