Re: why rpg and not cobol

Hi, Dave (and Vern):

COBOL runs on many other platforms (both current and now obsolete). In fact, that was one of the original design goals for COBOL -- to be able to write business applications that were "portable" from one machine to another -- a radical idea at the time (1950s), since almost all programs were written in the assembler language for a specific machine, or in some emergent higner-level language that existed only on one particular brand of computers. (There were hundreds, if not thousands, of these languages, invented in the 1950s and 1960s, but most of them have faded into extinction, as have many of the platforms they ran on.)

RPG, on the other hand, was never as popular, outside of IBM circles. A few vendors did create an RPG compiler for their machines, but not too many were very successful. And those were mainly RPG I or RPG II.

Mark

> On 4/11/2013 7:54 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Hi Dave

Congratulations on the offer. As to COBOL and RPG - are the jobs all on
the IBM i? Or are they on mainframes, as well?

Vern

On 4/11/2013 6:30 AM, Dave wrote:

I started my programming training with the basics of COBOL, and I remember
being horrified when I first saw RPG. My job as an RPG programmer was
recently abrubtly terminated, but I've just had an offer of employment as a
COBOL programmer. I will be trained, so how can I refuse? Even if it
doesn't work out, I end up with another tool in the box. But I just saw
something that made me even more optimistic about COBOL : on the most
well-known French employment site, if I type RPG, I get 30 jobs in the
whole country. If I type COBOL, I get more than 180! I seem to remember
that when I started out, things were the other way round. Could this be due
to the demise of the i, whereas systems using COBOL aren't as easily
replaced? Or, has COBOL advantages over RPG?


2013/4/11 John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Dave <dfx1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

2013/4/10 <Dirk.Marien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Choosing between them is like choosing between Outlook and Notes:
they have a slightly different way of 'processing', but basically, they

do

the same thing, they have the same objective.

But on the i, I suspect that the overwhelming majority choose RPG. Why?

Why

is COBOL the choice for mainframes?

The first answer from James (explaining the history) was a pretty good
explanation. "Report Program Generator" had a syntax well-suited to
its target audience. I would expand on it and say that building the
cycle into its design was also a major advantage for its intended use.
For that group of users/operators, and for the tasks they needed to
do, I would argue that RPG was *objectively better* than COBOL.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the machines
where COBOL dominated (and perhaps still dominates) did not come with
RPG.

Finally, though I think sheer inertia is the main thing that makes
most i programmers choose RPG over COBOL today, RPG does have some
distinct advantages for a modern audience. RPG IV is much more like
mainstream programming languages, whereas COBOL is more verbose and
English-like. And today, if you are working with databases and you
want English-like, you are going to go with SQL anyway, rather than
COBOL.

I disagree with Dirk that RPG is pretty much interchangeable with
COBOL. I mean, in a theoretical sense, it is. Both languages are
Turing complete. But when it comes to actually using them, they have
different enough styles that being comfortable with one doesn't
automatically translate into being comfortable with the other.

John
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