Now that Austec International Pty is pretty much home and dry in its proposed acquisition of Ryan-McFarland Inc, Rolling Hills Estates, California, the Melbourne, Australia company is reviewing the opportunities created by the expansion – not least beyond its previous specialisation in Cobol. Chief executive Les McNeill told Microbytes Daily that the company now has plans for Fortran on the Macintosh II. The combination of Austec and Ryan-McFarland creates a major new player in the language market, McNeill claims – but it does not intend to compete with Microsoft or Borland in the low-priced compiler market. We don’t consider C a major business language, says McNeill, suggesting that Cobol is still better than C for networked business applications since its data structures are entirely machine-independent and because Cobol has greater numerical precision. McNeill also says that a major focus of Austec is the integration of PC-DOS machines with mainframes in the Cobol business applications environment – where it will find itself in a head-to-head contest with Micro Focus Plc.
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