Rich kids are into COBOL

[Dale H. Cook]

At 01:33 AM 2/18/2015, Ben wrote:

>COBOL and FORTRAN in my mind are the main working languages.
>All the others just seem to teach some sort of computer science ...

And that was the original purpose of Pascal. Niklaus Wirth initially designed Pascal as a procedural language to teach structured programming. In the CP/M days I experimented with other languages (I had Mix C, Turbo Modula-2, and others that I got pretty cheaply but never did much with) but ended up sticking with Turbo Pascal optimized with some assembly language routines.

In high school in the late 1960s, at the MIT High School Studies program, I looked at a number of languages but ended up studying and working mostly with FORTRAN and ALGOL because my primary interest was in scientific computing. I wrote some programs in SNOBOL because string manipulation intrigued me. I took one look at a COBOL manual but realized that I had no interest in business applications.

Dale H. Cook, Roanoke/Lynchburg, VA
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