This reminds me of a very old story (begin of 1990s).
I once had to write a translator for a report generator language (not
RPG, but similar),
which was in use on Polish ODRA computers (ICL clone). The target
language was COBOL.
After some weeks of work, I delivered the first version. The "customers"
(a team of programmers
of another company) tested it and after some days responded like this:
"very fine, very fine.
BTW: is it possible that the subtractions all show the wrong sign?"
It turned out that I generated
SUBTRACT A FROM B GIVING C
for
C := A - B
much the same way as
ADD A TO B GIVING C
for
C := A + B
not realizing that this is correct for ADD (sequence of operands doesn't
matter),
but not for SUBTRACT :-)
BTW: the translator still exists; it is written in Pascal, but I guess,
nobody uses it today.
The report generator language is not bad; IMO, this would be a very
smooth method
to build COBOL reports (of course, some work needs to be done, for
example, the
language has some system variables with Polish names, this should be
fixed).
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 18.07.2020 um 10:42 schrieb Wayne Bickerdike:
IDEAL(CA/Broadcom) has MOVE and SET. They do the same thing. Which do you
prefer:
MOVE A TO B or
SET B = A ?
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