On 13/03/2020 23:45, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> 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!
>
It's a long, long, long time since I tried it (36 years ago) but ISTR
compiling an ALGOL program on my DG Nova 1200 was an 11 pass operation
using paper tape. i.e. 11 tapes in the compiler/assembler/linker/loader
plus the intermediate tapes punched.

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