5 Apr
2020
5 Apr
'20
10:31 a.m.
On 4/5/20 7:24 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL.
The product of a very flawed academic system that decided
to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that
academics know what's best for the industry.
COBOL was remarkable in several respects. Structured records being one
of them. (FLOW-MATIC was actually a bit superior in that the record
structure information was separate from the program). Strong data
typing was another one.
Grace Hopper did a remarkable job keeping the CODASYL show together,
long before ANSI took an interest in standardizing languages.
On the other hand, there's always PL/I--a language for everybody and
nobody. Be ye FORTRAN, COBOL or Algol programmer, you can, like Burger
King, have it your way. A co-worker from IBM once told me that the
original IBM PL/I committee was a band of misfits.
--Chuck