Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

["Richard Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net>]

"Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu> wrote in message
news:mailman.71.1086647025.391.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org...

>   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).

COBOL, prior to the 1985 standard, was a dreadful language for
structured programming.  In fact, it was so horrible that I have no
compunction in stating that true structured programming was almost
impossible in the language.   Even after the improvements in the 1985
standard, COBOL programmers continued to use the language in
stupid ways.

The ANSI-1985 standard added scope terminators to the IF, READ,
and PERFORM statements, added an in-line PERFORM, added the
powerful EVALUATE statement, and enabled subroutine calls by
both value and reference.  These and many other enhancements to
the language were substantial improvements.  However, most
COBOL programmers took a long time to learn to use them.

The COBOL EVALUATE statement is one of the most powerful
constructs of any existing programming language.  I wish we had
something like it in Ada, but we don't.

We must keep in mind that a large percentage of COBOL programmers
were not blessed with a computer science degree.   A large company
would give its employees the IBM Programming Aptitude Test (PAT) and
offer programming school to a few who got an A on that test.   COBOL
programmers more often than not were people who already understood
the application domain and took their new knowledge of programming
to that domain.   Eventually, they might escape the company that
trained them, but they would take the domain knowledge along with the
programming skills to another similar domain when they changed jobs.

The industry has changed since those early days.   Now, we seldom train
from within.   The computer science graduate comes with a set of
technological
skills and no knowledge of the domain.   Those skills are portable, as they
were before, but we must educate that new programmer about the domain.
I'm not sure that this is progress.

Richard Riehle