Rich kids are into COBOL

On 02/18/2015 12:08 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: <rant> That's one of the things that bugs me today--there are too many incompatible versions of COBOL out there with IBM being one of the chiefest offenders, amazingly. That's what COBOL 75, IIRC, was supposed to eliminate--no "extensions" unless specifically enabled. The Navy audit tests of that time checked for "extended" behavior and would fail you if something sneaked through. I mean, in the world of standard COBOL, what the hell is a COMP-5? FORTRAN at about the same time was suffering similar "vendor enhancement creep". CDC FORTRAN certainly had its share, including one of two "enhancements" that could lead to ambiguous statements. Univac had FORTRAN V. (Internally, IBM initially called PL/O "FORTRAN VI"). It was getting pretty bad. Later FORTRAN/Fortran standards mandated that any standard FORTRAN had to have the capability of compiling and running the standard and flagging anything not conforming to the standard. Which was pretty useless.the original author of a program set out from the beginning to write a portable program. Otherwise, the typical programmer is going to enable all the bells and whistles and leave it to some poor sod in the future to handle cross-platform issues. BASIC is perhaps the worst. How many widely-used BASICs conform to X3.113-1987? Visual BASIC? Ha! --Chuck