On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 19:47:21 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> 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.
>
Well, actually she wrote the first assembler, FLOW-MATIC the grandfather
of COBOL and masterminded MATH-MATIC which heavily influenced FORTRAN.

Look up FLOW-MATIC in wipedia - there's a big enough example to give a
decent idea of the language. It was a rather less verbose language than
COBOL and you could also claim it was an origin of BASIC, since it used
line numbers instead of labels.

But I still think COBOL was a wrong part, it only because there was never
a consistent grammar which made compilers much bigger and slower because
most of its verbs needed their own parser - the only consistency is that
all its sentences are imperative and start with the verb. Parsing
compound statements must be a nightmare, and don't get me started on the
ALTER verb!

> It was also written so that it could run on small RAM  computers A
> considerable achievement.
>
Of course, since *everything* had very little RAM in those days.
Remember program overlays and multi-pass compilers with lots of workfiles?
And not forgetting the COBOL ALTER verb, a crutch for flea-power
computers if there ever was one.

The first machine I used had a whole 8K of 39bit words, no storage other
than paper tape, but compiled Algol 60 considerably faster than I ever
got a 1903S (32K 24 bit words and 50MB disks) to it.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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