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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]