Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> Cobol suffered from lots of 
> things like excessive verbosity and clumsy control structures,

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