Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

On Sun, 18 Aug 2024 19:21 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

In article <v9t3ih$2e8ee$1@dont-email.me>, OrangeFish@invalid.invalid
(OrangeFish) wrote:
 

An interesting comment on the learning curve (and I know nothing about
COBOL) given the story that the language was created to allow
non-programmers to programme.

 
It doesn't require learning concepts that are strange to accountants or
bookkeepers.

Level numbers? “USAGE IS COMPUTATIONAL”? “RESERVE «n» ALTERNATE AREAS”,
“ALTER «target» TO PROCEED TO «dest»”? All the fun of the “MOVE”
statement?

(That’s just off the top of my head; I’m not going to look at any actual
COBOL documentation to try to remember more.)

Makes you wonder why they didn’t include double-entry bookkeeping as a
built-in language primitive: now *that* would have made it more directly
relevant to the bean-counter types.

Oh, and compound interest requires working with transcendental functions,
doesn’t it? Which means worrying about rounding errors. But noooo, that
would have been encroaching into “scientific” territory, which was firmly
off limits ...