On 22/04/2017 1:20 AM, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
Is it naive to hope that Swift some could "replace" COBOL on z/OS? I'm not
clear on IBM's ideas of what Swift would be used for on z/OS.
There have been many attempts to replace COBOL over the years. Anybody
remember EGL? That was a flop. The elephant in the room is Java, isn't
it? The worlds
dominant enterprise application programming language with an army of
available programmers on the cheap!
IBM has embraced server side Swift and has partnered with Apple creating
web server frameworks. That's certainly off the radar on z/OS.
If you look in the examples directory you will see two examples of
interoperability with C and PL/I which show just how easy it is to
interface legacy languages with Swift (no COBOL?).
To be honest, I don't see much of a step up with Swift from modern C++
(C++-11). The semantics are very similar. One spanner in the works for
Swift WRT to legacy data
is that Swift strings must be Unicode. Of course, the same applies to Java.
IBM are also porting Googles golang which is a competitor to Swift. It's
all goodness because of lot of modern software is written in these
languages.
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