🚀 go-pugleaf

in article <1990Jul14.050542.628@ariel.unm.edu>, blowfish@carina.unm.edu (rON. (blowfish@carina.unm.edu)) says:
> Just a couple of questions on Cobol- especially in reference to the PC and
> variations/clones.
> 
> 1) How many (if any) compilers/interpeters are currently available?

I know of Acucobol, Ryan-Macfarland, BPI (Still around?), Microsoft and
Realia.

> 
> 2) Are any of them any good?

Acucobol is a "run-time" environment.  Interpret that as the slowest.  
Although Acucobol is ansi-85 oriented, I would not suggest it for
any file, numeric, or even screen oriented programming.  They really
ought to abandon the Run-time idea and go for some speed... 

Ryan-Macfarland is also run-time, but I have benchmark results showing it
faster.  

BPI was a little better than those (compiled).  Microsoft is compiled.  When
I was using it, It was broken (Buggy), so I have no valid current opinion.

Realia is the one I use.  Compiles my 18000+ line order-processing system
at about 13,000 lines per minute, it executes blindingly fast, and it's
SORT is faster than OPTSORT v4.  It also packs a phenominal file indexing
system which is the main reason I am still using COBOL.

> 
> 3) Are there any major (or minor) differences between a mainframe Cobol and
> the PC versions?

Realia is almost literally IBM VS-COBOL on a PC.  The fact that I run many
of the file processing programs written in REALIA COBOL on 309X machines
running VS-COBOL should serve as a good example.  The others do not meet
this test.

> Please respond by mail: blowfish@carina.unm.edu(!ariel.unm.edu)

I thought others should hear this too...
--
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