More fun stuff about Cobol

[drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley)]

I believe that Grace Hopper has been promoted to Commodore, up from
Captain.

Cobol has been used for non-numerical work.  One early compiler (from
Hopper's shop) was written in Cobol in the early 50s.

Hopper, in order to prove that non-numerical programming was
*possible*, wrote a symbolic differentiation program.  One person this
was demonstrated to accused her of having a human feeding the results
into the program by a back door!  (This is likely to have been well
before compilers were written, but perhaps not...)

The original Cobol project was an attempt to put together a subset of
English that would allow non-programmers to program computers, thus
eliminating professional programmers.  Halfway through, it was
realized that this was impossible, so they changed the goal to produce
a programming language that could be read by a non-programmer.  Thus,
the project that started out to eliminate programmers produced the
language that 70-80% of all programmers work in!  (ref Perlis's
article in CACM blasting 'Star Wars')

Dale
-- 
Dale Worley    Cullinet Software      ARPA: cullvax!drw@eddie.mit.edu
UUCP: ...!seismo!harvard!mit-eddie!cullvax!drw
Apollo was the doorway to the stars - next time we should open it.
Disclaimer: Don't sue me, sue my company - they have more money.