Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 2024-09-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:38:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>

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 you just change
>
   DEFINE TYPE COMP AS COMP-3
>
to
>
   DEFINE TYPE COMP as COMP-4
>
and that would take effect everywhere that COMP was used?
>
Oh, wait, COBOL didn’t have typedefs ...

 
I suppose I could have done the equivalent of s/COMP-3/COMP-4/ in the
text editor of the day, but that would have also changed the fields that
were not only legitimately COMP-3, but which could not have been held in
a COMP-4 variable.
 
Sometimes you just gotta Do the Right Thing, no matter how long it
takes.