Rich kids are into COBOL

To my mind that is why it _succeeds_ as a programming language. Perhaps I'm just revealing the paucity of the languages I know, but it does to me - in particular, it's one of the very few languages I know in which arrays are first-class objects, and the only one I know with a reasonably rich set of operators tuned for operating on arrays. It doesn't, actually; I've seen APL systems described which use ASCII substitutes for the various `special' characters. (I suspect code written that way would be less readable than with the proper characters, but that's equally true of, say, C's trigraphs.) It is. But I'd say that's a positive thing; a language that isn't an interesting toy - ie, isn't fun to play with - is unlikely to be much good for anything larger. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B