ICL1501 Cobol manual available

[Neil Thompson]

BASIC was all we had - we used COBOL on the ICL VME 2900 maniframes that
were backending the 15xx machines.  Believe me, if the programming staff
had known COBOL was available on the 15xx machines, we would have moved
heaven and earth to put it on the micros.

So no, not the end-all, and I'm fairly sure I never implied that anywhere.

On Wed, 8 Apr 2020 at 00:48, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> On 4/7/20 3:24 PM, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
> > Why?  Because we used to run out of resources regularly on that machine
> > writing the stuff in EBB, which was also compiled (I may be wrong, but I
> > seem to remember compiling stuff on it).  And BASIC, even EBB, is
> generally
> > smaller than COBOL.
>
> COBOL provides for better data typing than most other languages.  (COMP,
> COMP-1, COMP-2 or COMP-3), picture clauses, data structuring, etc.
>
> If what you need is simple, maybe BASIC is fine.  But it's not the
> end-all by any means.
>
> --Chuck
>
>