Re: Answering an Ada/COBOL Question

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article
<Pine.BSF.4.10.9911132308290.27448-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
  Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> I also found the ML version of the case syntactically much
> nicer. Also, pattern matching works on more than just
> sequences of booleans. Note that I am not commenting at all on
> the suitableness of FPs for
> fiscal programming, just on the claim of "most elegant case
> design" for  COBOL.

These are not simply Booleans in COBOL, they are conditions,
which are rather different in COBOL than other languages.

Make sure you really know the COBOL facility well (don't just
rely on Richard's quick example) before deciding that the ML
syntax is better for dealing with decision tables. Knowing and
having used both languages, I definitely agree with Richard here
and disagree with Brian. Yes the ML facility is general and
powerful, No, it is not nearly as syntactically friendly and
convenient as COBOL.

A little interesting history here. When the Steelman
requirements were finalized, one of the first steps was to do a
careful comparison against existing languages. One of the
languages was COBOL, and in fact COBOL came very close to
satisfying many of the requirements, closer in many regards
than say C or Pascal. I believe [though I may be remembering
wrong here] that Jean Sammet was involved in this review. But
the general feeling was that COBOL was not a serious contender
as a language base for non-technical reasons (too many competent
programming language experts are sure COBOL is junk and the fact
that they have never looked at it does not deter them from this
strongly held opinion). A little anecdote there. In academic
programming language circles, it is almost required that people

a) not know COBOL
b) know that it is junk

I advised a PhD student in the early 70's (Carma McClure, who is
now married to James Martin) whose thesis topic was the design
of structured approaches for COBOL programming, and more
interestingly, a theoretical and experimental analysis of
the effect of using a structured approach. She attended one
of the Codasyl conferences at the time, the only academic
person attending, and everyone kept asking "what are you
doing here? no one from academia ever comes here!"

Robert Dewar



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