[E-Lang] Re: E questions

[Bill Frantz]

At 8:52 PM -0700 7/6/01, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>At 07:27 PM Friday 7/6/01, Ken Kahn wrote:
>>Visual Basic has literally millions of programmers. There are probably
>>plenty of others: PL/I, Postscript, Zeta Lisp,  Qunitus and Sicstus Prolog,
>>Cobol, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and probably lots more that spread while being
>>non-open. And maybe someday even ToonTalk ;-)
>>
>>Maybe they should open source their language but it is hard to make that
>>argument based upon history.
>
>...
>
>Visual Basic, PL/1, Cobol, and Postscript support your point.  Of these,
>only VB is reasonably recent.  Since VB became prominent, several new
>languages with open source implementations have become prominent.  Besides
>Java, what other big successes have their been for proprietary languages
>since, let's say, 1995?

While VB and Postscript may support the point, PL/I and Cobol are so old
that they fall under (at least in the IBM implementations) the situation
MarkM's comments about:

>I seem to recall the source to cfront from AT&T being generally available.
>While I don't know what the license terms actually were back then, people
>also paid less attention to these terms.  If source was available, then
>fixes were made and distributed without assuming that permission was needed.

IBM made the source for all its software available up until the early
1970s.  Since Cobol is a 1950s language, and PL/I is a 1960s one, source
for both languages was available in the early days.  Fixes were usually
sent back to IBM, and would be included in future releases (but not
acknowledged as coming from outside IBM).

(In the early 1970s, IBM, in its infinite wisdom, decided that closing the
source to their software would give them competitive advantage.  We still
live with the results of that disastrous decision.)

Cheers - Bill


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