13 Dec
2015
13 Dec
'15
12:53 a.m.
On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 4:45 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
you could feed the cards through an INTERPRETER, which
printed the card
On Sat, 12 Dec 2015, Eric Christopherson wrote:
The plug board could control which columns of the punch card appeared in
which columns of the printout; it served as a simple FORMAT program. The
COBOL interpreter plugboard rearranged the COBOL source on the punch card
to a more readable style on the printer.
-- Charles
content
on the card.
[snip]
For many years, I kept around a plug-board
labelled "COBOL INTERPRETER",
just to prove that a COBOL interpreter was possible :-)
Are you using "interpreter" in two
senses here, or just one? That is to
say, I'm not sure if you're saying the "COBOL interpreter" was just a
program that printed COBOL source on a punched card, or if you mean it
actually ran the program.
Yes, I was deliberately conflating two disparate meanings of the word.
When a friend was discussing compilers V interpreters, I pointed to the
plug-board, and said, "SEE! There IS a COBOL interpreter!"
The board was itself not a COBOL interpreter, nor even intended to be
labelled as such. The ladelling was intended to identify that it was a
plug-board FOR the Interpreter (not BEING an interpeter), and that it was
plug-wire programmed for doing decks of cards containing COBOL code.
"COBOL" and "INTERPRETER" should have been two separate labels. I
kept the
board around for years, just for the sake of making that ridiculous
misinterpretation.