Rich kids are into COBOL

[ben]

On 2/19/2015 12:21 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 02/18/2015 07:56 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>> I would not call the CHM 1401 a production machine.
>>
>> There might be a System/3 still in real service (at least there was
>> about four or five years ago).
>
> The point is that COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol, etc. get a bad rap.  Look what
> they had to run on--you can't do that with C or several other more
> contemporary languages.

In the late 50's you just got color TV. I suspect nobody
thought of computers hooked up to that then.



> Which brings up the question "Do you design a machine to run a language
> or design a language to run on a machine?"  That appears to have changed
> over the last 30-40 years.  Are we poorer for that?

I think so, with the advent of 8 bit computers.The problem is like 
inflation, cheaper money or cheaper logic to bring down the standard
of what is needed logically in a system.


> The financial world didn't seem to mind decimal machines.  Are we going
> to make a dollar (or Euro) equal to 128 cents to accommodate radix-2
> machines?

The Euro is 1.12345% over the the US Dollar. Looks like REAL to me.


> --Chuck
>
Ben.