Re: ALTER, ASSIGN and labels-as-values (was: Unicode in strings)

According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

As I said before, you could easily scan the source code and find all
the ALTER statements ...

Hm, I'm guessing you've never dropped a box containing 2000 source cards.

COBOL dates from about 1960, while online text editors, as opposed to
coding forms and keypunches, didn't become common until the 1970s and
in some places even later.

It really mattered that it was obvious that a Fortran assigned GOTO
could go anywhere, but in COBOL an altered GOTO looked just like an
unaltered one.

Dunno why COBOL didn't have label variables instead.  It wouldn't
have been any harder.
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