Re: encapsulating directory operations

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 19:23:42 +1000, Paul Edwards wrote:

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message
news:101dac8$mkpm$3@dont-email.me...

>
Mainframes are supposed to be all about COBOL code, aren't they? Or so
we keep being told.

 
That would make the IBM COBOL compiler the most important compiler in
the world, not the most important C compiler in the world.

We heard that 20-30 years ago. IBM’s declining fortunes over all that time
clearly indicate otherwise: batch-oriented mainframes are simply not a
growth market. All that COBOL code is going out of use, one way or
another: if the companies reliant on it don’t retire it, they are more
likely to go out of business anyway. It’s just free-market competition in
action.

Most of the remaining COBOL code nowadays is compiled with ... wait for
it ... GNU COBOL. And the GNU compiler suite is, I believe, written in C++
at its core these days (used to be C).