On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 13:23:35 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 12:41:02 +0000, Daniel James wrote:
>
>> In article , Daniel James wrote:
>>> ... I can't think of ANY programming language that does this as easily
>>> as COBOL (no, not even Algol68) ...
>>
>> I posted too soon ... Ada (of course!) has library support that mimics
>> COBOL input and output formatting in the Text_IO.Editing package.
>>
>> The Ada package is modelled on COBOL, but doesn't implement everything
>> you can do in COBOL (no internationalization, radix indication, or
>> parentheses to indicate negatives) but the using CR or DB to indicate a
>> negative is there ...
>
> Interesting. I've never used Ada.

I should have added that the main problem with COBOL is that its far too
damn verbose, e.g.

READ CUSTOMER-FILE INTO CUST-REC KEY CUST-NAME
     INVALID PERFORM UNKNOWN-CUST-NAME.

and back in the day, when programs were punched on cards and compilation
listings came out on the lineprinter, Murphy said that the printer would
be slightly out of register and its ribbon was old and dry, which made
the full stop at the end of each sentence almost invisible. Full-stops
mean stuff to a COBOL compiler!

But I thought then, and still think now that its fundamental flaw is that
its designers thought that there are two types of programmer: those who
understood Fortran/Algol/C style assignments and others who could only
understand something that looked like English text, but who could
nonetheless understand all the ramifications of a complex data
declaration or some of the more arcane variations of a PERFORM or a SORT
statement. Thats' false thinking, of course, but it did leave us with the
most verbose computer language in the known universe.

Right: back to writing Java.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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