On 13/03/2020 14:32, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> But I thought then, and still think now that its fundamental flaw is that
> its designers

Its designer. Grace Hopper, a US Navy rear admiral.

> 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.

No,that is assembler
Grace wrote Cobol for accountants who understood their data, not computers.

It was also written so that it could run on small RAM  computers
A considerable achievement. I regard it with teh same awe as 'C' in that
it allowed massive programs to be written by quite ordinary programmers


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Gun Control: The law that ensures that only criminals have guns.

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