Comments on: PHP itself isn’t that much different from COBOL

By: David

David — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:12:10 +0000

Thanks Dave, you’re absolutely right!

By: Dave S

Dave S — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:09:37 +0000

Dude, it’s “different from”, not “different than”. Your title is illiterate.

By: icke

icke — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:17:52 +0000

Hello!

Interesting discussion about COBOL and PHP.

I can imagine how Tony feel about PHP and COBOL.

I´m since a long time an application devoloper on the IBMs System i commercial plattform with focus on business critical applications in RPG and have COBOL experience too.

At the moment I make my experience with PHP.

Sure, languages seem to be similar. But in real life it´s not all about syntax and structure.

PHP is a great chance. I could be the COBOL of the web world.

But for business critical application there are some important leaks, that etablished plattforms and language deliver since more than 30 years.

Things are missing:

A real compiler (zend?).

Specify a variable somewhere in the code is great. But don´t step in mission critical operations on a non defined variable. The whole shop (production, delivery, supply chain) could stop. I´m never sure if the deployed application is really neat. In an enterprise scale this is hard to manage.

Missing persistence. On large plattforms main storage is organized by OS and not by applications. Nobody talks about a swap file-limit or storage managment.
You can keep data connections and programs open as much you like.
This simplify your work and stability. You don´t need to care about the business to coordinate reenter a program or to do the “keep variables in mind and restore them”-job with a special storage part like session variables. And this is very important.
Because: All is session.

Missing seperation business layer and presentation layer: Large programs in php are hard to maintain. On business critical application the focus is on the application code. This is on of the most important job that is missing in php. Sure there are lots of concepts, but there is not a real solution. Regarding of the skill level you can imagine how difficult it is to manage different programer skill levels and “dialects” in an enterprise application??

The good the thing is: You can start quick an application with php and php has a lot of potential.

Greetings from germany

alex

By: David

David — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:34:01 +0000

Technically, a “CALL … USING” can be performed by using a “REQUIRE ‘xxxxx.PHP’” or “INCLUDE ‘xxxx.PHP’” which simply copies in the source of the PHP file into the executing code. PHP doesn’t have a compiler, so it is all interpretive and parsed.

The PERFORM UNTIL’s I’ve worked with can be replaced with WHILE routines, but I believe I’m probably missing your point.

I haven’t seen anything anything that COBOL can do that PHP can’t, unless it is specific to some peripheral software, maybe CICS, VSAM or DB2.

If you post an example of the code you think doesn’t convert well to PHP, I’ll try to give a shot at it.

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:15:14 +0000

I’m forced to use PHP, since the world has unfortunately moved in that direction. By comparison, PHP appears primitive. Is there any reliable converter that can convert COBOL to PHP?
I’m used to writing structured COBOL code with the PERFORM targets lying out of sight, so the program flows almost declaratively (PERFORM UNTIL). It appears that PHP can’t do this, as everything is in-line. And true subroutines as in CALL ….. USING don’t seem to exist. However, a superior converter could solve all of these problems.