28 Nov
2007
28 Nov
'07
3:35 p.m.
So? The poor kid is likely to develop CTS before he
hits 18. I took COBOL in HS, and man did I hate it.
FORTRAN was much more funner.
As a general point, I would think that any language used for this should
be very interactive, like BASIC, Forth, Lisp, and so on. A kid is going
to lose interest fast if he has to edit the source file, then run the
compiler and maybe the linker.
Besides, where would you find a COBOL compiler for a
peecee or whatever else? Here's a question - what
8-bitters (or defunct 16-bitters, Atari, Amiga, you
know, the common stuff) had COBOL available?
There was a Cobol for Z80-basied systems, mostly CP/M, but it wouldn't
suprise me if it was ported to the TRS-80 too. I do know it was available
for the BBC Micro with Z80 second processor, for example (but that is a
CP/M machine).
Was there ever a 6809-based Cobol to run under OS-9? It wouldn't suprise
me.
I am also pretty suee there was an MS-DOS based Cobol. I think it was
avaialbe for the HP150, for example, which means it must have been
available for the IBM PC.
A smattering of assembly language to begin with
maybe. That's something someone will learn only if
they want to. Lots of people have problems with it.
Hence my continuing recomendation for BBC BASIC, which has a built-in
assembler for whatever processor the machine is based on (origianlly, of
course, the 6502 in the BBC micro, but there's a Z80 version of BBC Basic
(Sinclair Z88, I think, and certainly the Tetung Einstein) and of couse
and ARM version in the Acorn Archimedes, etc.
-tony