Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by ScottBurson on Sunday June 04, 2017 @09:41PM
(#14484780)
PL/I on CP/M? Really? Must've been Subset G :-)
Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by skissane on Sunday June 04, 2017 @10:04PM
(#14484863)
CP/M was written in a different subset of PL/I, PL/M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/M
The PL/M source code for various version of CP/M can be inspected here: http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html
(Maybe I am being somewhat inaccurate in calling PL/M a "PL/I subset"; maybe it would be more accurate to say that PL/M is a distinct language which was heavily influenced by PL/I, a member of the PL/I language family.)
Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by ScottBurson on Monday June 05, 2017 @03:13AM
(#14485813)
> CP/M was written in a different subset of PL/I, PL/M
It is somewhat amazing to me that I can't recall that I ever knew that, despite once having owned a CP/M machine and having written some software for it. I always assumed it was written in assembly.
Not entirely true. One obvious thing it influenced was PL/I, which was supposed to unify FORTRAN and COBOL along with block-structured programming from Algol. PL/I was only ever moderately successful. While it saw some use in business data processing, COBOL was always more popular for that task. I think its biggest successes were systems programming (e.g. Multics, CP/M, MVS, Honeywell CP-6) and compiler development (e.g. the compiler for the HAL/S language used to program the space shuttle computers). (In most of those applications, they didn't use pure standard PL/I, rather dialects such as PL/M, PL/S, XPL). In those applications, compound data structures are very important, and the PL/I syntax for those was obviously influenced by COBOL (in the use of level numbers). And PL/I has in turn influenced several other languages, I think the most notable would be REXX, although I'm not sure how much of the COBOL influence survives in those descendant languages.
Other languages COBOL arguably influenced include DIBOL (a business programming language developed by DEC, it was a mishmash of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC) and ABAP (SAP's application programming language, derisively nicknamed "German COBOL").
Ada annex F (Information Systems) was consciously influenced by COBOL, especially in the concept of "picture strings". I think the influence of COBOL picture strings can be seen in other languages also, e.g. the date formatting syntax used by java.text.SimpleDateFormat. So in that small area, arguably Java is descended from COBOL.
I personally think the syntax of SQL shows some definite stylistic influence from COBOL. A similar wordiness and proliferation of keywords. Since SQL was designed by IBM in the 1970s, and the first implementations of it ran on IBM mainframes, obviously the team that invented it were very familiar with COBOL, and it shows.
English Wikipedia reports that the legacy telecommunications programming language CHILL (CCITT High Level Language) was influenced by COBOL–no idea how true that is. Polish Wikipedia reports the existence of a mid-1960s Soviet language called "Algek", which was based on Algol and COBOL. Around 2000 someone invented a language called "CobolScript", which was supposed to help COBOL programmers get into web development – it didn't take off.
This is all odds-and-ends, but it isn't literally nothing.