| DIBOL was invented, more or less, at DEC by a guy named John Cohen,
to run on PDP8s. It's "Digital's Business-Oriented Language." That
particular implementation was pretty bad. In 1972 a couple of other
people and I rewrote it for PDP8s and speeded it up by about a
zillion percent. A bit later, in 1974 or so, we wrote a version for
PDP11s. Around 1980, about the time I left the DIBOL group, somebody
did a version for VAXen, which I don't know much about.
Anyway...DIBOL has no connection with COBOL as far as its family
tree is concerned. It is designed for the same kinds of business
applications, though. At one point were describing it as "COBOL
without the wordiness." Instead of having to say,
ADD VALUE1 TO VALUE2 GIVING VALUE3
you just say VALUE3=VALUE1+VALUE2
for instance.
It's all pretty intuitive, I think. It's a pretty simple language.
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Steve, Thanks for explanation.
Can applications written in Dibol on VAX be migrated to Alpha
easily via the following means :
1) DECmigrate (VEST) -image translation
2) DEC Dibol ?? -source recompilation
i.e. any version of Dibol existed to generate Alpha code,
(something like VAX Cobol for VAX and DEC Cobol for Alpha) ?
I need your advices.
steve
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| You're beyond me! I stopped with PDP-11s in 1980. But...
based on the *very* little I've heard, I'd guess that VEST
*might* work. But that's 99.99% guess. Assuming a VAX
DIBOL is "well behaved" (whatever that may mean) it should
work.
I've not heard of any version of DIBOL for Alpha, so #2 (recompile)
is probably out. But I could be wrong on that one too. Didn't
we (DIGITAL) sell off DIBOL support to an outside vendor a while
ago?
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