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.
>
> 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
>

Just about any language can be compiled on a small computer as long as:

1) you have a couple of tapes,
2) you are willing to sort the source program multiple times, and
3) time is not an object.

In fact, this was the common compiler approach!

--
-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II:  http://michaeljmahon.com

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