On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:38 -0600, Larry Vaden wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Always Learning <centos@xxxxxxxxxx> 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.
--
With best regards,
Paul.
England,
EU.
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