Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

David Schultz wrote:

On 5/18/24 12:16 PM, John Levine wrote:

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.
 

It certainly didn't make it easier for people learning to use it.

I remember way back in my undergrad days, when keypunch was king, that every semester at some point someone would hang out a shingle: COBOL Help Desk.

Never saw the equivalent for FORTRAN, etc.

I, myself, played the Fortran part. But, instead of having a help desk,
I could do almost anything a Fortran programmer wanted over a
telephone.
I was sitting over my soldering bench disassembling a stereo, and
teaching
a person how to do a simple sort program while repairing a stereo
amplifier.