Re: Another measure of Ada's rejection by corporate America

[davidm@rational.com (David Moore)]

Chuck Bramlet <"ELL447::BRAMLET"@ECC7.ATENG.AZ.HONEYWELL.COM> writes:

>Also, for the record here, COBOL was brought to us many years
>ago by the same people who are now pushing Ada (the U.S.
>Government).

Not really. The Government was involved but not in the same way as with Ada.

> Thankfully, I have not had to endure the agravation
>of taking a COBOL class.  But, I understand that COBOL is about
>as programmer friendly as Ada.

Talk about damning with faint praise! I have not written large amounts of
COBOL for something like 7 years and the language has changed (I hear
rumours of Object Orientation - I saw a claimed example of same in a Journal
but either the example or the COBOL extensions are horribly wrong).

Classic COBOL has no block structure, no types (you can fake it on
some compilers with "COPY"). One procedure per compilation unit (there is 
a "perform" which allows you to out-of-order execute and return within a
compilation unit but you cannot pass parameters and there are no local
variables) . No effective looping constructs, so you have to use go-tos 
(or performs) everywhere.

For a while back in the eighties a number of companies were trying to
market "4GLs" (fourth generation languages) as a replacement for COBOL.
The ones I saw had the characteristic of being approximately as broke as COBOL.
Usually they were as broke and much more limited in functionality
as well. Even so, a lot of companies bought them. 

One wonders how hard it would be to sell a real language like Ada 95 
to COBOL shops, especially if integrated into an environment that supported 
conversion of applications. You would want the new decimal capabilities
that were introduced in Ada 95, of course.