Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

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

"Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu> wrote in message
news:mailman.75.1086745242.391.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org...
> Richard  Riehle wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Certainly you are using here the words "structured programming" as a
special
> term, that is, in Dijkstra's sense. But that way of structuring programs
is
> not the only possible way, and it is not generally best, that is, there
are
> major application domains for which this way isn't the best. There are
other
> ways for structured programming (in general sense), and COBOL was very
well
> suited for some of them. For example, if you have ever read "Principles of
> Program Design" by Jackson, you may recall that JSP was quite happy with
> COBOL.

Sorry, but COBOL was totally ill-suited to support of well-formed structures
of any kind prior to ANSI-85.  Take the horrible model for an IF statement
as an example. Those of us who had to use this half-baked conditional
formation recall how easily it led to programming mistakes.   The addition
of END-IF in ANSI-85 solved that problem.

The fact that Jackson "was quite happy with COBOL" is simply an indication
of the widespread stupidity regarding the shortcomings of the earlier forms
of the language.   No intelligent contemporary programmer would want to
return to hideous mess of tangled code so typical of pre-ANSI-85.

Structures, in the Dijkstra sense, was far more than "GO TO Considered
Harmful."   More important, though, are the elementary control structures
of Jacopini and Bohm which, when properly formed, will include scope
terminators such as ANSI-85, END-PERFORM, END-READ, END-IF,
etc, without which the resulting code is usually a mess.   I have written
and
maintained code written by others, in COBOL 68, 74, and 85.  I would
never want to do anything in 68 or 74 again.

In my view, COBOL, prior to the ANSI-85 standard was not "very well
suited" for writing maintainable, dependable, well-structured code, in the
Dijkstra sense, the Jackson sense, the Jacopini and Bohm sense, or in any
other sense.

Since the ANSI-85 standard, COBOL has become one of the most interesting
languages around.  It has corrected the silliness of the earlier standards,
and
can be used as effectively for creating maintainabl software as well any of
the
competing technologies -- when used by a competent programmer.   The
same could not be said of the earlier standards, where the code so often
evolved into a "pile of dry rot held up by a flying buttress."

Richard Riehle