Re: Answering an Ada/COBOL Question

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article > That doesn't apply here. I'm easily convinced, if
> you're right. So far,  I haven't seen a demonstration of the
> power of COBOLs case statement that
> makes me think it isn't a degenerate case of pattern matching
> on a boolean  tuple.

Really you just need to spend some effort learning COBOL and
make up your own mind. If you don't want to spend this effort,
then why bother. In my experience it is wasted effort to produce
examples in a case like this unless people have an overall
understanding of the language context.

> Robert asserted that it is better for programming decision
> tables, but based on your short example, I think ML is
> superior.

You cannot base an opinion on a short example written in a
language you do not understand. For example, if you do not
know what a CONDITION is in COBOL, you probably don't really
understand the example.

I don't particularly have any great desire to convince the
world that COBOL is an interesting language with lots of
interesting features that are worth knowing (a lot of the
world knows this already :-) People have to decide for
themselves whether they will take the effort to learn a
language to find out for themselves what is interesting.

>  Does anyone who
> knows both languages feel like posting some convincing code
> snippets?

I know both languages, but decline the invitation, since I don't
think a useful argument can be made with "code snippets" in
languages that people do not know.



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