Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

According to Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:

A similar concept was implemented in COBOL, where the designers though
that having to write
>
ADD A TO B GIVING C
>
or somesuch makes programming easier than writing
>
C = A+B
>
in FORTRAN. ...

>
That's a common misconception. The point of having COBOL look like
English wasn't to make it easier to program but to make it easier for
non-programmers to read. Think of an auditor looking at the program to
see if its business logic matches what the company says it does.

That may have been the idea, but I think the idea was wrong.  People
learn in primary school what + means.  Variables are somewhat later,
but COBOL does not spare auditors from understanding those.  The case
of = is interesting in that FORTRAN's usage is decidedly
non-mathematical in statements such as

I = I+1

However, my experience is that beginning programmers have no problems
understanding the idea of imperative programming (less than e.g.,
understanding the use of = in Prolog which is much more mathematical)
and assignments even after many years of being taught with the use of
= for equations.

In any case, I think that even an auditor who does not know
programming at all will find the FORTRAN syntax for a computation like
the one above easier to read than the COBOL syntax once he has to read
more than a dozen such statements.  Hasn't COBOL also included a more
mathematically oriented way of writing computations?

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>