Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:39:20 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

It wasn't that hard to write report programs in COBOL ...

Reports from ISAM files, to display devices using fixed-width fonts,
maybe; not so much from databases. or more readable-quality output.

COBOL could never match the simplicity of database accesses in a more
modern language, like Python:

    def db_iter(conn, cmd, mapfn = lambda x : x) :
        "executes cmd on a new cursor from connection conn and" \
        " yields the results in turn."
        for item in conn.cursor().execute(cmd, ()) :
            yield mapfn(item)
        #end for
    #end db_iter

How to use?

    list(db_iter
      (
        db,
        "select name from planets order by name",
        mapfn = lambda x : x[0]
      ))

Output:

    ['Jupiter', 'Mars', 'Mercury', 'Neptune', 'Saturn', 'Terra', 'Uranus', 'Venus']