Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

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

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:demdnZCSTppt91fd4p2dnA@comcast.com...
> Richard Riehle wrote:
>
> > The data structures were consistently global, thereby making the notion
of
> > localization of data impossible.   The fact that FORTRAN also failed to
> > provide adequate scoping rules for conditional constructs does not make
> > the same defect in COBOL any more acceptable.
>
> But there was a major difference.  It was common in COBOL* in the 60's
> and 70's to write what we would now make a subroutine as a Cobol
> program, and use JCL to tie the various COBOL programs together to
> create an application.

Ah, yes.  How fondly I recall those // punched cards.  :-)
>
> Yes, I can agree that programming in JCL was painful, but that had
> little to do with COBOL, and everything to do with the memory sizes on
> then current machines.  You couldn't fit the whole program--or whole
> dataset--in memory, and you wouldn't run into thrashing, since most
> machines did no have virtual memory.  (Yes, I know that some 360s and
> all 370s had virtual memory support, but you had to run an OS that used
it.)

Agreed. We so often found ourselves doing workarounds due to program size
limitations, along with lots of other entertaining restrictions on the IBM
OS's.  This
particularly frutstrating, at times, with DOS.  I preferred the Burroughs
OS, but
it was not as popular.
>
Richard Riehle