Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 28/09/2024 08:18, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 9/27/24 4:38 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
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On 9/27/24 13:43, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
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On 2024-09-27, geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com> wrote:
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Cobol was also very portable.

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As long as your destination compiler supports COMP-3.  :-)

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Or your source computer didn't have COMP-3, or if you didn't use it.

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I was once called in to optimize a CPU-bound COBOL program.
The genius who wrote it declared all subscripts as COMP-3.
Changing them to COMP-4 knocked 30% off the execution time.

    Did COBOL even HAVE real "types" ???
    It was not really a "sophisticated" language.
   It was MEANT mostly for biz/commercial apps,
   esp financial and scheduling. It was GOOD at
   that - except for being TOO ugly/confusing in
   the chase to be "simple/self-documenting".
    I don't hate COBOL - it HAD/HAS its place.
   However the real-world implementation could
   never live-up to "The Vision".
    COBOL could/can be "improved" - made more
   efficient. But NOBODY is gonna DO that
   these days. As such COBOL kinda becomes
   like 'Latin' - an unchanging 'dead' lang.
   This MAY be a good thing.
 

COBOL was massively good at what it did, and what it still does.
Batch processing  *enormous* quantities of data with a few small routines.
It was designed for and on machines with very small memories, initially core store, but very large data sets stored on hard drives or tapes, and is massively efficient at utilising that. 64k of RAM and a z80 was a luxury for COBOL
Its ideas about data organisation led to the relational database.  And thence SQL and friends
A subject about which most people here know very little.
Analysing businesses and writing code to streamline their operations is a different art  to network programming. *All* the hard work is in the analysis and initial data definitions and structures.
Back in the day the lowliest part of that process was the 'coder' who simply turned the specs into clean COBOL ....:-)
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