Re: COBOL history, Article on new mainframe use

On Sat, 31 Aug 2024 23:43:48 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

Um, if you spent ten seconds looking at the 1960 COBOL report, you would
have found IBM listed as one of the contributors, and it specifically
lists the IBM Commercial Translator as one of thte sources for COBOL.

Yeah, I rechecked my copy of Sammet, and IBM did indeed have someone in
CODASYL working on COBOL.

But they were not among the first to implement the original 1960 spec:
that was left to Remington Rand and RCA.

Um, if you spent another ten seconds looking at the 1964 NPL report
... it would be glaringly obvious that the numbered data structures
 and picture data come directly from COBOL.

Of course. They were trying to offer an alternative to COBOL, weren’t
they? And were less than successful at that.

I was going to ask “Why level numbers? Didn’t they know about how
structures were done in Algol W?”. But it turns out Algol W didn’t come
out until 1965.