Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

O.K. Just for the record, I did time as a COBOL programmer when I was 
first out of college, so I'm not speaking from either inexperience or 
ignorance. And I still think that it was both excessively verbose and 
had clumsy control structures. Others may like it and they are free to 
do so. I'll stand by my opinion that COBOL succeeded mostly because 
there was absolutely nothing better available at the time for business 
data processing - not because it was a shining example of a flawless 
language loved by all who were asked to use it. It succeeded amazingly 
well because neither Fortran nor assembler were well suited to the needs 
of business programming. Now that Ada has lots of support for things 
like decimal numbers and "picture" statements its harder to argue that 
COBOL is still the superior language for business data processing. ;-)

MDC

Alexander E. Kopilovich wrote:
> 
> One of the most evident common things shared by COBOL and Ada was (and perhaps
> still is) widespread (among programmers) habit to talk about major drawbacks
> in these languages not knowing them and being induced mostly by own attitude
> towards the principal application domain (or the internal culture of that
> domain) for the language.
>   I heard these arguments about excessive verbosity and clumsy control
> structures - countless times, and always that was said by people who don't
> understand and don't feel anything about processing of commercial data; most
> of those people also didn't know COBOL at all, but this is secondary - the
> primary issue is ignorance and deep dislike of the application domain, which
> is associated with the language.
>   I used COBOL quite heavily in 80th and never thought that it is excessively
> verbose or that its control structures are clumsy. It was a language perfectly
> adequate to its principal application domain taken together with the state of
> hardware.
>   I think that COBOL "suffered" from its features only in imagination of
> people who were not involved in real commercial data processing (or were
> involved, but hated their job for other reasons).
> 
> 
> 
> Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
> Saint-Petersburg
> Russia
> 
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

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