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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

"Compliance-wise, it passed 97% of COBOL 85 conformance tests, a success rate not yet achieved by proprietary vendors, Sobisch boasted."

Thinking about that if you step back is amazing, to think a standard written in 1985 (I was doing COBOL back then into the 90s) has yet, even today not had any of the big names/players meet full compliance nearly 40 years later.

I'd love to read more about that aspect

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Same applies to SQL, FORTRAN, JSEngines, POSIX, even C and C++ compilers, if you bother to go through all the little letters legalese on the standards and cross check with their latest implementations, outside the big three it is even worse.

It appears everyone only strives with good enough, fine tunes with bug reports for lesser known features and that is about it.

From an SQL background, this doesn't really surprise me at all. PostgreSQL is the closest anyone's ever got to being fully ANSI SQL compliant, with most of the proprietary vendors having rather paltry compliance numbers.

>I'd love to read more about that aspect

See the

  DATA DIVISION. 

  FILE SECTION.

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