Python and Industry, IBM I'm afraid

[Alex Martelli]

"D-Man" <dsh8290 at rit.edu> wrote in message
news:mailman.979786609.2939.python-list at python.org...
    [snip]
> I have a part time job at a local grocery store that has a
> video department.  The computer system they use is an IBM
> mainframe with AIX (4 I think).  What is the language that the
> software is most likely written in (earliest copyright on it
> is late '80s, around the time the ANSI C standard was
> published)?  COBOL or C (or some other language)?

Hard to say without more data, but, since AIX is and always
was a Unix flavour, C is your most likely bet (but, of course,
just about any language is available for Unix).

Late-'80s AIX was a VERY different (still Unix-flavoured)
beast from the later AIX 4, and AFAIK it was not practically
used on mainframes at the time (there _was_ an AIX/370, or
something like that, that you *could* run on mainframes, but
it didn't sell much at all); AIX 3.2 was the OS for the
IBM 6150 workstation (here in Italy it did sell reasonably
well, including many used to run our CAD software of the
time on -- just 2D, back then -- but I don't think it was
much used for grocery stores' video departments:-).

AIX 4 came out in the early '90s (I remember the trips to
the heavily secured IBM location where the only not-yet-
announced workstation running AIX 4 was kept -- that's
where we had to go to port our software so it would be
announced together with the new machine and OS... as I
was freshly moved to this CAD software firm after many
years with IBM Research, the paranoia-level security did
not really surprise me much:-).  As I recall, its main
"here's our horrible surprise of the day for you" feature
was a malloc that would never return 0 even if you asked
it for FAR more memory than you had around -- rather, the
program died horribly later when it actually tried to USE
the memory it THOUGHT it had allocated... a "designed-in
feature", they adamantly insisted, NOT a bug (later I
did meet some BSD variants with this wonderful 'feature'
too -- never did I really understand WHY one would play
such a trick to poor application programs...!); that
accounted for well over half of our porting woes to
that specific box/OS.  Later, they did relent and allow
some ways to bypass the 'malloc never fails' feature.

Not that this helps determining the unknown application
language used where you work, of course, but, it's good
to keep these things in mind when complaining about today's
porting difficulties -- they aren't NEW problems...!-).


Alex