From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5faad1722103f6a7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!news1.google.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!d9c68f36!not-for-mail Message-ID: <40C51203.9010205@noplace.com> From: Marin David Condic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 (OEM-HPQ-PRS1C03) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics References: <40C44F24.8010902@noplace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 01:11:04 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.165.3.185 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net 1086657064 209.165.3.185 (Mon, 07 Jun 2004 18:11:04 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 18:11:04 PDT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1223 Date: 2004-06-08T01:11:04+00:00 List-Id: 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 > > > -- ====================================================================== Marin David Condic I work for: http://www.belcan.com/ My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm Send Replies To: m o d c @ a m o g c n i c . r "Face it ladies, its not the dress that makes you look fat. Its the FAT that makes you look fat." -- Al Bundy ======================================================================