Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

MitchAlsup1 wrote:

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.

Reminds me of talking to a Hydro guy in southern Iran, close to the Iraq border, who had a non-bootable laptop. I was able to tell him on the phone how to run debug to load the master boot record and hex-edit it to make it bootable again and then write it back, without seeing his screen at any point.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"