Re: Nested Conditionals (was RE: gnubol: Braiding #1 #2 #3

[Michael McKernan <mck@tivoli.mv.com>]

>>>>> "Bill" == William M Klein <wmklein@ix.netcom.com>
>>>>> wrote the following on Fri, 3 Dec 1999 20:00:31 -0600

  Bill> As the former "owner" of the Micro Focus LRM, please GOD tell
  Bill> me you aren't trying to "support" everything that they do -
  Bill> because some programmer some day may ask you why it compiles
  Bill> there and not on your compiler.

  Bill> Besides adding such "exciting" old technology as TRANSFORM
  Bill> and the ON statement, this would force you to support every
  Bill> IBM variation (documented and undocumented) that has ever
  Bill> existed (from "complex ODO's to allowing "> then" - and I
  Bill> don't mean "than" - as a valid relational operator).

  Bill> Again, I may not convince you of this, but I seriously doubt
  Bill> that you will get "significant" user demand for allowing
  Bill> conditional statements where the Standard requires
  Bill> imperatives - and if you allow it as an extension, I really
  Bill> do guess that this is going to "break" some of the conforming
  Bill> stuff (I know it did for Micro Focus).

Bill, I have worked on three up from the ground COBOL development
projects, all on different standards.  (I missed '74, so I am a real
dinosaur.)  The last one completed about '87 and MF probably wasn't a
force to be reckoned with at the time, and certainly wasn't in the
earlier efforts. If you substitute IBM for MF, though, that kind of
consideration was always near the top of the list.  Being successful
in the COBOL business meant compiling the code that existed.

I don't know why this extension would break anything.  I never heard
that it did in the Wang implementation.  I think there must be
something else going on here.  Remember, the extension is essentially
to supply the delimiter where the programmer should have written it.
The generated code from such a program and a correctly written one
should be indistinguishable.

Sorry I distracted you with that comment.  I hope the rest of the
post was meaningful.

Best regards,

Mike



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