Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:32:25 +0200
Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:

Michael S wrote:

On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:40:00 +0200
Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:
 

MitchAlsup1 wrote: 

On Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:21:00 +0000, John Dallman wrote:
    

               I had a basic COBOL course at college in 1980-81,
and became quite clear that this wasn't what I wanted to do.
>
John 

>
So, John is not a COBOholic !! 

>
Also not a COBOL fan, mostly due to the verbosity.
>
I once ported a COBOL-specific algorithm to Pascal, which meant
that I had to reimplement code for all the 80-col punch card
formatted IO as well as sorting according to quite special rules.
>
The original was 25 pages, my replacement ~5, at least half of
which was the COBOL specific function replacements, so the
mainline code became an order of magnitude smaller.
>
Terje
 

 
What would be the size if you were porting it from COBOL to COBOL ?
 

Huh?
 
Are you asking about optimizing the COBOL to be much less verbose?
 
I have absolutely no idea where I would even have started such a
task, I just looked at the actual source code, while already knowing
_what_ it was doing, and then figured out how to reimplement it in a
different language.
 
It is quite possible that the original COBOL was non-optimal, but I
still have no way to determine that.
 
Terje
 

My assumption was that majority of size reduction happened due to
identifying repeated patterns and implementing them as subroutines.
Which could be done in any reasonable language. I know nothing about
COBOL, but hope that it supports subroutines.
I simply don't see how mere syntax difference between COBOL and Pascal,
which by itself is not particularly terse or particularly expressive,
could alone account for such massive reduction in the size of the
progarm text.