I suspect that English, or indeed any natural language, is a basket case for the unambiguous specification of an executable program.
The notion of making COBOL English-like has the effect of making it long-winded. The whole idea of making programming 'easy' needs to be discarded. There was a time when one had to be something of a programmer in order to use computers, but that time is long past, and the mind set associated with it needs to be discarded too. Teaching a little programming may be useful as demystification. Teaching a little secondary-school physics is useful too, but no one supposes that someone who has completed such a course is a physicist. None of this is to be taken as a recommendation that programming be made opaque or harder than it needs to be, but I have grown very weary of being called an élitist when I recommend a piece of technology that is judged too difficult for clots. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
