On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:38 -0600, Larry Vaden wrote:
On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Always Learning centos@g7.u22.net wrote:
At my second computer job in 1967 on a Honeywell H-120 (a baby machine with 3 tapes which took 1 hour to do a Cobol compilation ...
I have always hoped to find someone who was involved with COBOL back in the days to ask this question of:
"What influence did Commander Grace Hopper have on COBOL?"
Don't know. Grace was occasionally mentioned in the computer press for getting awards in the USA (I think she was in the USA Navy) but we programmers, new to a new world of computing, just wrote programmes, debugged them, did some systems analysis and ventured into assembler coding and system programming.
Grace never ever influenced me or anyone else I knew who did Cobol. She was just a name to the majority who programmed in Cobol.
I used to think it took someone 2 years of writing in Cobol to become efficient in using it and visualising solutions which could be implemented in it.
Well written Cobol was easy to maintain but some clowns never properly used the self documenting features of the language (i.e. meaningful data names - contrast with add csum to itotal). The alternative was longer data names, for example inv-gross-total, inv-delivery-cost and overdue-3-mths-total etc.
Many programmed in Cobol but fewer used the language to its designed extent.
The worse thing about Cobol was the long windiness of it before one came to the Procedure Division. Later on Picture became Pic and very useful string handling was introduced (the alternative was refining the same field multiple times).
It used to be my favourite language, after Easycoder and 6502 assembler, then I discovered PHP.