Language Support
The S/36 had four compilers: RPG II, COBOL, BASIC, and FORTRAN. RPG was cheaper, created compact code sizes, and became by far the best-seller. Cobol's popularity in the larger business community made it popular on the S/36 as well. Fortran is not very practical for data processing purposes, and while BASIC was powerful and easily portable to other IBM computers, it was limited by being implemented as an interactive 40K session.
One feature of the S/36 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.
Read more about this topic: IBM System/36
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