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From: larry@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Ada & Business DP
Message-ID: <880630153039.221@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 30 Jun 88 22:30:39 GMT
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--
I see no shame to admitting that I once did CoBOL programming; I think 
language chauvinists are ridiculous.  Engineers should know that every tool 
has its good and bad points.  The essence of engineering is to make trade-
offs, and that's as true for the tools used as the tools produced.

Business programming initially involved fairly simple calculations on large 
and regularly changing data sets, and fairly complex data (re)formatting.  
CoBOL was designed for this and it does this well.

Ada's calculation facilities are adequate for this job, as is the efficiency 
of most Ada compilers (though there are still some rough edges).  What it 
lacks to match CoBOL is a standard facility for reading and formatting 
data.  Since Ada was designed to be extensible, this can be added seam-
lessly and without major effort.

The more progessive business programming shops use one of several 
commercially available utilities that allows programmers to "paint" I/O 
screens and print-outs, specifying the prompts/descriptive legends by simply 
typing them in at the correct location.  Programmers then specify the type 
of data to be read/written in each field, its constraints, and error 
processing.  Once that's done, code can be automatically produced.  It 
usually is not terribly good but is adequate.  Already at least one public 
domain utility of this sort is available in the Ada SW Repository.  (I 
believe its in <ADA.FORMGEN>.)

The largest and most complex business data processing is typically done with 
a database management system.  Specialized jobs the DBMS can't handle alone 
are often done by writing short programs that make calls to the DBMS for all 
but the special processing.

Today "business data processing" is diverging ever more widely from their 
traditional kind of processing.  Ada, with its more general capabilities, 
extensibility, and support for programming-in-the large (and the 
capabilities mentioned in the three previous paragraphs) is a better choice 
than CoBOL--assuming business programmers and managers can overcome their 
laziness and the various Ada myths.
                                     Larry @ jpl-vlsi   (VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV)