Language Compilers
The S/34 had five: RPG II, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, and Assembler. RPG was cheaper, created compact code sizes, and became the best-seller. Cobol was popular in the business community. Fortran is not very practical for data processing purposes, and while Basic was nice, it was implemented as an interactive 40K session. Assembly language is efficient, but it is a little too easy to accidentally create a processor check on the System/34.
One feature of the S/34 was that Basic and Fortran were exclusive. One could not run a Fortran program on the system when running Basic, nor vice versa. Fortran was certainly not a popular language, so one would suppose this microcode level problem was only annoying to academia.
The implementation of Basic on the S/34 is very close to that of the System/36, the System/23, the System/38, and the AS/400 (iSeries.) The implementation of RPG II on the System/34 is similar to the RPG II used on the System/36, the System/370 and the System/390, but not like the RPG III and subsequent RPG compilers for the iSeries.
Read more about this topic: IBM System/34
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“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
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