22 Jun
2006
22 Jun
'06
7:03 a.m.
>It was thus said that the Great Don Y once stated:
>>
>> So, the question: are (were) there any useful languages
>> designed that did not rely heavily on punctuation in their
>> syntax?
>I can only think of a few that did not rely upon
punctuation that
>much. COBOL is one (although I don't know it well enough to say).
At 18:55 21/06/2006, Bob Brown wrote:
COBOL does rely on the period.
I worked for several years using BOS COBOL and it's successor
"Speedbase" which added database and a gui. These had dropped the
requirement for the period; you could probably get away without not
using any punctuation at all bad quotation marks..
Of course, it was still terribly verbose!! Witness:
PROGRAM HELO01
DATA DIVISION
77 YRNAME PIC X(20) * don't have a long name!
01 FILLER * just to keep things together.
02 NUM1 PIC 9(6) COMP * comp means store in binary not ascii
02 NUM2 PIC 9(6) COMP
02 NUM3 PIC 9(6) COMP
PROCEDURE DIVISION
DISPLAY "What is your name?"
ACCEPT YRNAME
DISPLAY "Hello "
DISPLAY YRNAME SAMELINE
DISPLAY "We're very pleased to meet you!"
DISPLAY "Enter a number"
ACCEPT NUM1
DISPLAY "And another"
ACCEPT NUM2
ADD NUM1 TO NUM2 GIVING NUM3
DISPLAY "Those add up to "
DISPLAY NUM3 SAMELINE
EXIT
ENDPROG
ENDSOURCE
that's from memory, btw...