I can tell you one thing: if IBM had written Perl, this would have never happened.

Not sure I agree with *that*... As an old mainframe programmer, I can tell you that when COBOL went from COBOL to VS COBOL II back in the late 80s, we practically had to recompile our entire mainframe library.

And it wasn't like it was obscure stuff... They did away with the EXAMINE statement, which was a staple of COBOL development.

It did away with the ON statement... and would no longer accept LABEL RECORDS...

Worst of all, the TRANSFORM statement vanished.

They had (supposedly) good reasons for making those kind of fundamental changes, but it didn't change the fact that COBOL, arguably the de facto programming standard of the time, was fundamentally changed long after it was a mature product.

So, don't be so sure that IBM wouldn't have done the same thing... they've done it before :)

Trek

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