On 14.3.20 01:45, 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!


That is about what the IBM 1401 Fortran did. It kept the
target program in the core and executed tens of compiler
overlays from the backing store (disk/tape).

--

-TV

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05