On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 10:24, Yves Goergen wrote:
> Von: "Ron Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 08:50, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> > > At 2003-08-26T12:52:33Z, Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > >
> > > > Too bad you have such a negative view of COBOL. In the hands of someone
> > > > with a brain, it's quite a powerful and modular language.
> > >
> > > All Turing-complete languages are equally powerful. That doesn't mean that
> > > any given one would fill me with a desire to start hacking around with it.
> > >
> > > You know, I'd never seen Cobol before the screenshots on your link. Those
> > > just confirmed everything I've heard about it. :)
> >
> > For a "Hello, World" program, or an OS, or a graphics toolkit, even
> > Admiral Hooper would not say that COBOL is the proper tool. OTOH,
> > for large commercial apps, COBOL is far and away the best tool for
> > the job.
>
> ehm, at my work, they have a real big host system. from what i've
> heard, it's programming language is cobol, running under a specific
> IBM OS. i don't know a lot of that stuff, but there'll be some
> good reasons why IBM did that.
>
> but my father (he knows cobol very well...) had massive problems
> coming from cobol (DOS) to some more current windows programming.
> from cobol, he has never seen multi-tasking/multi-threading concepts
> nor (graphical) windows, a mouse or even such principal programming
If he's used a mainframe OS, he's used a multi-tasking OS, and
he knows it full well. His green-screen is/was single-tasking,
but heck, so were the teletypes & VT-100s used by early minicomputer
programmers.
> language conepts as functions (!). one must imagine, how can cobol
> be an easy to understand and to maintain language if you're by design
> supposed to write spaghetti code like it was once in gwbasic?
When I programmed in COBOL-74 (unless your father retired in 1975,
he's used it), I used *many* procedure (a.k.a. sub-program) calls.
The COBOL-74 that I learned in University was hell, since the
books tried to teach GOTO-less methods for a language that *needed*
the GOTO to be rational.
When I got into the Real World, I relearned COBOL-74 from truly
excellent men who knew how to use COBOL-74's strengths to ensure
that source code written in COBOL-74 does not have to look like
an explosion at an Italian restaurant.
> IMHO any C/pascal-like language or partially still (visual) basic
> seems far more fiendly to me. and i was involved in the developemt
> of some bigger (partly commercial) applications now, and i must
> say that VB and VC++ are very good tools for such.
Some time after I left the COBOL job, I was employed writing C
in an app that screamed for COBOL. I'd say that 1/5th of the
SLOCs, and most of the bugs, were of the form:
strncpy(really_long_variable, another_long_variable,
sizeof(another_long_variable));
By commercial, I meant record-oriented "data processing" type
software, not programs sold in stores and catalogs or by sales
people.
> and, yes - i'm a student, too..... (you may think of me what you
> stated above, it may be right or not)
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jefferson, LA USA
"As the night fall does not come at once, neither does
oppression. It is in such twilight that we must all be aware of
change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting
victims of the darkness."
Justice William O. Douglas
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