On 9/25/24 3:11 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2024-09-25, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
COBOL ... well ... would rather NOT use it.
The whole "self documenting" idea turned out
to be crap - COBOL is *hard* to understand
sometimes.
Yes, the dream of a language that a manager could read
was rather naive. As Robert L. Glass (under the pseudonym
Miles Benson) once wrote in his column in Computerworld:
"His programs were so readable that he once had one
published in the _Saturday Evening Post_."
Heh heh ...
Anyway, great IDEA - but the *realization* was
kind of impossible. A computer language has to
be able to do lots of "computer stuff" and Joe
The Branch Manager is NOT gonna follow that at all.
Just TRYING to make it "accessible" made it all
the LESS accessible.
TOO damned WORDY also ... nearest thing is JavaScript
with aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff.gg(ww.xx.yy(z)) ... 'object'
CAN be carried just TOO far, which is why I tend to
stick pretty close to K&R 'C' ....
BUT ... huge amounts of still-used BIZ/GOVT software was
writ in COBOL. It WORKED, was solid. So, it IS worth
doing a few little apps in it every so often just to
stay aware. These days, few can afford to re-do
What Works in some other lang. Payroll, Scheduling,
vendors, banking ... the nuts-n-bolts stuff.
Those old narrow-tie Dilberts were GOOD at their craft.
But it left a lot of room for humour, e.g. "The Common
Business-Oriented Goldilocks", which tells the story
in COBOL.
I joined a PPOE at the same time as a new department head
who was quite a character. Our inside sales manager,
Al Tannock, popped in and said to him: "Say something
in COBOL." Instantly our guy shot back:
EXAMINE ROOM REPLACING ALL TANNOCKS WITH SPACES.
Hee, hee, hee ... I wonder if Al got it ? :-)
Of course now - MyString.replace("Tannock"," ") ...
there's "replace_text()" in some FORTRANs that
do the same thing, otherwise it's more ugly.
Hmm ... re-did a number of my fave funcs, mostly
for dealing with ascii-delimited strings/records,
in FORTRAN when I did my last little app to annoy
the new boyz. Gotta dig up that pgm and review.
PICK had "field(str,delim,fldnum)" which I always
found very useful, so that's usually the first thing
i'd move to another lang. Python now has the basic
equiv these days though you can also just split()
and go from there which will be more backwards
compatible.
Oh, one lang I can't stomach - ADA. It's just
SO fascist ...... wrote a few little things in
ADA, including linked-lists of linked-list records,
but that was IT, I was DONE. First off you had
to write translator funs between static and
dynamic strings and use 'em like EVERYWHERE or
you wouldn't get ANYWHERE. Rust isn't the 2nd
coming, despite the fanatics, but it's still a
LOT nicer than ADA. Otherwise IMHO RUST is just
another pointless mini-redo of 'C'. If it LOOKS
kinda like 'C', just use 'C'.
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