--BwCQnh7xodEAoBMC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 11:25:55AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > 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: >=20 > strncpy(really_long_variable, another_long_variable,=20 > sizeof(another_long_variable)); >=20 > By commercial, I meant record-oriented "data processing" type > software, not programs sold in stores and catalogs or by sales > people. I find that Perl is a very nice language that avoids such low-level problems. There's a whole family of such scripting languages that begin with the letter P. Perl, Python, Php, Pike,... The advantage here is that the main (only?) implementation of each of these languages is an excellent free software implimentation designed for Linux/Unix and ported to every imaginable OS (from VMS to Windows to Plan 9). Other advantages include the fact that these languages are general purpose and can pretty much handle all kinds of problems. And also the fact that they are easily extensible through C. I don't know much about Cobol, but if it's a simple language then I think it might be worth it. But if it's a complex language with such a limited scope then I think it's not so great. SQL is a good example of a simple very specific language. Perl is a good example of a complex very general language. Very specific languages that are too complex are being killed off by languages such as Perl. For example people going from awk to perl (there's even an a2p script that'll do automatic conversion). Bijan --=20 Bijan Soleymani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.crasseux.com --BwCQnh7xodEAoBMC Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/S8kbUof+95vTyAwRAjrHAKCmSiCx8PAnwBpD+5Adp6YIlbmhUgCgrxSN FNA++tMAOa50bwRtLQmU8uI= =wUt3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --BwCQnh7xodEAoBMC-- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
