On May 27, 2008, at 2:01 PM, Jim Allan wrote:
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.
I used SORT (and DSORT before it) thousands of times, and they both
worked just fine. My best guess, from the use of the word "properly",
is that these were idiots who expected the sort algorithm to be stable
(i.e., to retain the original input sequence of records collating
equal), which no optimized external sort ever has been.
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.
Yes, and it worked in other COBOLs, too, but it was not portable,
because the original 1960 design swept under the carpet the question
of how many decimal places to give to the intermediate results. Shops
that were serious about writing portable COBOL generally forbade the
use of COMPUTE altogether.
--
John W Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in
their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is
suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has
become full of /Pooh./"
-- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface
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