On Apr 16, 2012, at 8:34 AM, McKown, John wrote:
----------------SNIP---------------------------------
Also remember that COBOL, at least originally, was supposed to be
very English-like and so usable by people at the Army PFC level of
training.
--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT
Hmmm... I was in the Army and we got PFC's from the programming
school (AZ? its been 40 years so forgive me). We had two groups, one
COBOL (batch processing) and one ASM group (essentially sysprogs).
The ASM group was by far the best IMO. I was on call quite often and
had to "fix" the cobol programs that went boom in the middle of the
night. The COBOL people were semi useless in debugging and when I
looked at the code they had produced (except for a few people) it was
hopeless to understand. I spent more time trying to figure out the
logic and compare what I was seeing in the dump. 1/3 the time I
helped the programmer figure out where his problem was and supplying
answers to his questions on what was in this field or that field.
What was interesting was that as the guys (no female programmers so
don't call me sexist blame the Army not me) as they became more
experienced the code became easier to follow. As they became became
better programmers there were less logic problems. Now having said
that most of the programs were smallish and only a few were
considered large so the smallish programs there was no excuse for
logic issues or mangled code. My memory is foggy here as to goto's
but I think the "rule" no standards if memory serves me that goto's
were to be minimized as a result flow was easier to follow and
frankly debugging was easier.
Ed
ps: We had one person who at the time he was drafted was working for
IBM and he privately told me about some OS enhancements that when I
first heard I couldn't wrap my head around as virtual (at least that
I had never heard of) was a nightmare that I couldn't wrap my head
around. After I got out of the Army (2 years) IBM announced Virtual
and I was able to ask some semi intelligent questions as my "preview"
and the questions helped jump start by job.
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