At 07:15 AM 26/4/95 -0500, Tony Furnivall wrote:
>  1. MF COBOL does not produce code which can be placed in an XL. This
>     means that calls to any other HP language are not supported. In
>     terms of preserving our investment, the only investment which is
>     preserved is the one in MF COBOL, everything else seems to get
>     blown away!
 
If calls to other languages are not supported how does one call TurboIMAGE,
or MPE Intrinsics?  I'd be surprised if this was correct in the way it was
interpretted.  Perhaps it can't general subroutines that can be called from
other languages, yes?
 
>  2. MF COBOL does not 'know about' or 'understand' KSAM data structures.
 
Is this true?  Are you talking about NMKSAM or CMKSAM?  I can't imagine
anyone wanting to give up the reliability of HP's KSAM for someone elses.
 
>I'd like to suggest to HP that any language product on the HP3000
>conform to the following bill of linguistic rights:
 
Generally, I can't agree that we have rights unless I know who granted them
to us and why.  I'm sure HP have reasons for backing away from promoting
their own COBOL over competitors.  HP's COBOL has not always been the most
'standard' (choose one :), especially for cross-platform development.  Nor
has it been the most feature-rich.  MicroFocus are doing some neat things,
especially with Client/Server implementations.
 
But all said and done, I would still prefer HP developed languages to
others. The reasons are the same as Tony: common use of tools,
inter-relation between various language products, better use of operating
intrinsics, commonality of manuals (hey they're all on the same CD!).
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Jim "seMPEr" Wowchuk           Internet:    [log in to unmask]
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