Hi fellows. Sorry I missed the big debate. I was asleep (literally, because I am in Sydney, Australia). continue below... On Friday 15 April 2005 23:41, Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Friday 15 April 2005 8:50 am, Colin Carter wrote:
If you're an old COBOL guy you are probably aware that a very large proportion of today's active code is still in COBOL (and FORTRAN).
Yes. My first language was FORTRAN on an IBM 7044. I learned COBOL and Assembler a bit later. My first machine was a smaller version ("desk top"), prior to these big ones; followed by an IBM, which I think was a 7095? (Big boy of the military era.) FORTRAN, Assembler, COBOL = normal learning curve, but I never worked COBOL. There are very few new applications written in COBOL, but there are COBOL compilers available on all systems. You may be correct about COBOL now, but only a few years ago I was reading that most of the active code (mostly written years ago for the big insurance companies, banks et cetera) was still COBOL. Maybe!
BTW: I am aware of the memory layouts of both the AMD64 (in both 32-bit and 64-bit mode) as well as EM64T (Intel's x86-64) as well as the Itanium. I'll have to pick your brains on this one if I am to code the AMD64 properly. :-)
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But, going back to standards. I was involved in porting some Burroughs COBOL apps to IBM 370 COBOL. What a mess: snip> nybbles. Yeah man! I don't heard this word much these days. Remember 7 bit ASCII code?
Some people think that BCD numbers were stupid; not realizing that they were important in money handling (preventing the crooked programmer from snip the part cent/penny).
Jerry Feldman
Regards, Colin