Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

According to Michael S  <already5chosen@yahoo.com>:

I once ported a COBOL-specific algorithm to Pascal, which meant
that I had to reimplement code for all the 80-col punch card
formatted IO as well as sorting according to quite special rules.
>
The original was 25 pages, my replacement ~5, at least half of
which was the COBOL specific function replacements, so the
mainline code became an order of magnitude smaller.

My assumption was that majority of size reduction happened due to
identifying repeated patterns and implementing them as subroutines.
Which could be done in any reasonable language. I know nothing about
COBOL, but hope that it supports subroutines.

COBOL is by design, really really verbose, e.g. what we would write as

  tg = kb + ro

is

   ADD KICK-BACK TO RAKE-OFF GIVING TOTAL-GRAFT.

It has only weak subroutines.  You can say

   PERFORM PARA1 THRU PARA2 VARYING THING-INDEX FROM THING-BASE TO THING-LIMIT.

it will set THING-BASE, jump to PARA1 and loop and return at the end
of PARA2 more or less like a FOR loop, but handling the parameters
beyond that is up to you.  At least in IBM COBOL there is a way to
break up a program into subroutines you can call with parameters
but there is so much mandatory glop for each routine (the whole
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, DATA DIVISION thing) that you're not going
to end up with a short program.

Also, as someone else keeps pointing out, any sort of string
processing beyond putting stuff in fixed fields is very painful.
 

I simply don't see how mere syntax difference between COBOL and Pascal,

You should look at some COBOL programs.  It's a whole different world.
--
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John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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