Admiral Hopper -- portable COBOL
Leslie J. Somos
I once heard Admiral Hopper speak at Cleveland State University.
(She handed out "nanoseconds" -- 1-foot long pieces of wire,
representing the distance electricity travels in a nanosecond.
She explained that she once asked an engineer "Show me a nanosecond.")
In her address, she mentioned that in the early days of COBOL,
they had to scrounge for machine time, on whatever variety of machine
was available, so they had a machine-independent version of COBOL,
written in COBOL itself (or I've got the story munged somehow).
The question:
Is that COBOL written in COBOL available? Published somewhere?
Thanks in advance,
Leslie
Don Nelson
From: Leslie J. Somos, ah...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu
Date: 20 Apr 1993 15:11:34 GMT
In article <1r13r6$s...@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> Leslie J. Somos,
I never heard about it. I knew Grace and most of the others involved with
the "early days" (I was chairman of the CODASYL COBOL Committee for
about 15 years and Grace and some of the others were on the CODASYL
Executive Committee), and none of them mentioned it. Because portability
was of utmost importance, the first live demo of COBOL was compiling and
executing the same program on two different compilers on two different
systems on the same day. Maybe this somehow worked its way into her
lecture. Her talks were always great. I had the great misfortune of
having
to follow her with a talk of mine once.
Anyhow, Micro Focus COBOL and RM COBOL are both written in COBOL. The
idea still lives to this day.
Don Nelson
COBOL Development, Tandem Computers, Inc
nelso...@comm.tandem.com
No clever quotes here
Dan Wright
: Anyhow, Micro Focus COBOL and RM COBOL are both written in COBOL. The
: idea still lives to this day.
I believe RM is written in C, and used to be written in assembler until
version 5.0. MF's runtime is written in C.
The MF compiler and ANIMATOR are indeed written in COBOL. The original
bootstrapping effort was done in the PC environment.
-- Dan Wright