26 Sep
2014
26 Sep
'14
6:23 p.m.
On 09/26/2014 01:13 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I taught COBOL exactly once (our department chair
believed that each
teacher should be able to teach every course). When I started my first
lecture, on the blackboard was Djikstra's quote:
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind.
It's teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
I have an alibi.
Dijkstra's illiteracy, Fred?
Seriously, what language in 1960 offered hierarchical data structuring?
"Special-names"? Choice between use of binary or decimal numeric
representations?
The list of langauge features is very long. I can remember being a bit
surprised that such a crufty language had built-in segmentation/overlays.
A co-worker back in the day was on the old IBM COMTRAN project. He
thought COBOL was a pretty good language; it was PL/I that he regarded
as a dog's dinner, citing extreme dysfunction among the project members.
--Chuck