Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

Anton Ertl wrote:

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.

I think few would disagree with both parts of that.  I certainly
wouldn't.  But I give the designers some slack as, in the late 1950s,
there was lettle knowledge about programming languages to go on.  Now,
the mistake is obvious.


snip

Hasn't COBOL also included a more
mathematically oriented way of writing computations?

Yes, the COMPUTE statement.  i.e. COMPUTE I = I + 1




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